Longing For Quotes & Sayings

He had known in times of the greatest misery or danger that his dreams of home, in which all things seemed beautiful, were in essence his longing for the woman for whom he had been made. That was how, as a soldier, he had seen it, and it was how he had come through. — Mark Helprin

I take the rawest, realest moments in anyone's life and I open them up and lay them bare. The innocence of a five year old child, the awkwardness of a teenager's first sexual encounter, the heartbreak of longing for a relationship you can't have, confronting the possibility of the death of your newborn child, whatever it is, you open your soul and put it out there and dare the world to read it, ready to have them stomp on you and laugh, but ready to do it again the next day. You have to put yourself out there as a writer, you can't play it safe. Great writing isn't safe. — Dan Alatorre

[Amy Carmichael's] great longing was to have a "single eye" for the glory of God. Whatever might blur the vision God had give her of His work, whatever could distract or deceive or tempt other to seek anything but the Lord Jesus Himself she tried to eliminate. — Elisabeth Elliot

Our world isn't about ideology anymore. It's about complexity. We live in a complex bureaucratic state with complex laws and complex business practices, and the few organizations with the corporate willpower to master these complexities will inevitably own the political power. On the other hand, movements like the Tea Party more than anything else reflect a widespread longing for simpler times and simple solutions - just throw the U.S. Constitution at the whole mess and everything will be jake. For immigration, build a big fence. Abolish the Federal Reserve, the Department of Commerce, the Department of Education. At times the overt longing for simple answers that you get from Tea Party leaders is so earnest and touching, it almost makes you forget how insane most of them are. — Matt Taibbi

I walk and walk with cold hands.
Back at the house it is filled with longing,
nothing to carry longing away.
I look back over my life.
I try to find analogies.
There are none.
I have longed for people before, I have loved people before.
Not like this.
It was not this. — Anne Carson

Witch, do this for me,
Find me a moon
made of longing.
Then cut it sliver thin,
and having cut it,
hang it high
above my beloved's house,
so that she may look up
tonight
and see it,
and seeing it, sigh for me
as I sigh for her,
moon or no moon. — Clive Barker

Betsy and I are going to try as hard as we can not to put the burden of that longing on each other," I said. "Instead, we will comfort each other in the longing and even love it for what it is, a promise that God will someday fulfill us. — Donald Miller

If there was a God, he'd guide the winds, let them blow for me so that, with a tug of my string, I'd cut loose my pain, my longing. — Khaled Hosseini

New York may end up being no more than a scrim, a spectral film that is none other than our craving for romance - romance with life, with masonry, with memory, sometimes romance with nothing at all. This longing goes out to the city and from the city comes back to us. Call it narcissism. Or call it passion. It has its flare-ups, its cold nights, its sudden lurches, and its embraces. It is our life finally revealed to us in the most lifeless hard objects we'll ever cast eyes on: concrete, steel, stonework. Our need for intimacy and love is so powerful that we'll look for them and find them in asphalt and soot. — Andre Aciman

At great periods you have always felt, deep within you, the temptation to commit suicide. You gave yourself to it, breached your own defenses. You were a child. The idea of suicide was a protest against life; by dying, you would escape this longing for death. — Cesare Pavese

You don't survive in me
because of memories;
nor are you mine because
of a lovely longing's strength.
What does make you present
is the ardent detour
that a slow tenderness
traces in my blood.
I do not need
to see you appear;
being born sufficed for me
to lose you a little less. — Rainer Maria Rilke

Her deep romantic nature prevented her from demanding, from asking for that quenching. She wanted it to come freely, like flowers that are sent and not requested. — Sean Ferrer

Whenever Sadie sees engagement rings, she feels a strange mix of emotions: a kind of excitement mixed
with a vague sadness. A longing for a speci??c kind of inclusion she both aspires to and fears. And, oddly, she feels a sense of failure, of
shame. She knows it's nonsensical, but there it is, big inside her, this sense of having screwed everything up, of having lost something she
never had. — Elizabeth Berg

Are we to look at cherry blossoms only in full bloom, the moon only when it is cloudless? To long for the moon while looking on the rain, to lower the blinds and be unaware of the passing of the spring - these are even more deeply moving. Branches about to blossom or gardens strewn with flowers are worthier of our admiration. — Yoshida Kenko

How should a man caught in this net of routine not forget that he is a man, a unique individual, one who is given only this one chance of living, with hopes and disappointments, with sorrow and fear, with the longing for love and the dread of the nothing and of separateness? — Erich Fromm

Neither day nor night is our master. And do you know what happens when a woman walks without fear?"
Teia shook her head, but there was a sudden longing deep in her that swelled so strong it paralyzed her tongue. Tell me. Tell me.
"She becomes."
Becomes what? Teia didn't say the words aloud, but he knew what she was thinking, for he answered:
"She becomes whatever she wills. Minus only one thing." In the dark, he held up a finger, almost like he was scolding her.
Teia was silent now. The question was obvious, and now she didn't want to ask it.
Sharp said, "She has one thing she can never be, never again. You know what it is, don't you?"
The words came unbidden to her lips, from a place so dark no light had ever touched it: "A slave. — Brent Weeks

She thought of the hardness and the coldness she had cultivated over those years and wondered if they were the mask she wore or if the mask had become her self. If the longing inside her for kindness, for warmth, for compassion, was the last seed of hope for her, she didn't know how to nurture it or if it could live. — Megan Whalen Turner

Do not, however, make the mistake of thinking that all desire is yearning. "We love to contemplate blue, not because it advances to us, but because it draws us after it," wrote Goethe, and perhaps he is right. But I am not interested in longing to live in a world in which I already live. I don't want to yearn for blue things, and God forbid for any "blueness." Above all, I want to stop missing you. — Maggie Nelson

Tenderness emerges from the fact that the two persons, longing, as all individuals do, to overcome the separateness and isolation to which we are all heir because we are individuals, can participate in a relationship that, for the moment, is not of two isolated selves but a union — Rollo May

Sexual desire may burn like fire, but when you give a thought to when you are ill, then your excitement dies down. Fame and fortune may be sweet as candy, but when you give a thought to when you die, then their flavor is like chewing wax. Therefore, if people are usually concerned about death and illness, this can also dissolve unreal activities and develop longing for the way. — Zicheng Hong

And so the beauty was in being alone; but it was also the pain. — C. JoyBell C.

I AM RESTLESS
AM restless. I am athirst for far-away things.
My soul goes out in a longing to touch the skirt of the dim distance.
O Great Beyond, O the keen call of thy flute!
I forget, I ever forget, that I have no wings to fly, that I am bound in this spot evermore.
I am eager and wakeful, I am a stranger in a strange land.
Thy breath comes to me whispering an impossible hope.
Thy tongue is known to my heart as its very own.
O Far-to-seek, O the keen call of thy flute!
I forget, I ever forget, that I know not the way, that I have not the winged horse.
I am listless, I am a wanderer in my heart.
In the sunny haze of the languid hours, what vast vision of thine takes shape in the blue of the sky!
O Farthest end, O the keen call of thy flute!
I forget, I ever forget, that the gates are shut everywhere in the house where I dwell alone! — Rabindranath Tagore

Nostalgia is a longing for your home. — Will Advise

The wish to be super-strong is a healthy wish, a vital, compelling, power-producing desire. The more the Superman-Wonder Woman picture stories build up this inner compulsion by stimulating the child's natural longing to battle and overcome obstacles, particularly evil ones, the better chance your child has for self-advancement in the world. — William Moulton Marston

I'm going to have to get an entirely new social scene if I want to avoid him,' she said, hunting for evidence of him amongst her friends' feeds. I made a sympathetic face, but my heart leapt up onto her, beat its fists on her heart, yelled, Me Me Me! — Olivia Sudjic

Calina studied Nessa's profile in the dim light of dawn. Her pulse raced as she formed a question in her mind. "Who do you want to be bothered by?"

Calina felt like anything could happen in the silence that followed. It wrapped around Nessa and her, stifling the breath from her body and tightening her throat.

Nessa shifted and turned so she was facing Calina. It was too dark for Calina to see Nessa's eyes, but she could feel them wandering over her face.

"You." The word was exhaled from Nessa as if a great relief had washed over her. "I want to be bothered by you. — Heather McVea

You are not a human being living your life, but you are a spiritual being longing for life. — Debasish Mridha

I know that suffering is one place where He ministers to us the most. So to think that we've had our quota would be foolish. I am just longing for the day when all the pain stops. — Mary Beth Chapman

Our longing for community seems to be a part of the image of the One Who made us, a part of the divine image whispered into us when we were whispered into being in the first place. — Robert Benson

History, for better or worse, is 'us' on a grand scale - full of secrets, beauty, fear, longing, and stifled love. Without history, our lives would not be complete, and we could not be, in the best sense, fully 'human. — Boria Sax

Yet my longing for her was like a bad cold that had hung on for years despite my conviction that I was sure to get over it at any moment. — Donna Tartt

Extremes mean borders beyond which life ends ... and a passion for extremism is a veiled longing for death. — Milan Kundera

She brushed the tears from their faces and sang them a melancholy lullaby. Her obvious devotion to her daughters pulled at my heart strings, making my chest ache with longing for my own mother. — A.B. Shepherd

Beyond today tomorrow reigns for yesterday has passed. Earth time is just a fleeting ploy, our spinning planet's ship ahoy; Our pale blue dot on brink of vast. — EsthersChild

Some people never say the words 'I love you', for like a child they're longing to be told. — Paul Simon

Every natural longing has its natural satisfaction. If we thirst, God has created liquids to gratify thirst. If we are susceptible of attachment, there are beings to gratify that love. If we thirst for life and love eternal, it is likely that there are an eternal life and an eternal love to satisfy that craving. — Frederick William Robertson

Asita wasn't hungry this day, however. There were other ways to keep the prana, or life current, going. If he did visit the demon loka, it would take enormous prana to sustain his body. There would be no air for his lungs to breathe among the demons.
He allowed the brilliant Himalayan sun to dry his body as he walked above the tree line. Demons do not literally live on moun-taintops, but Asita had learned special powers that allowed him to penetrate the subtle world. He had to get as far away as possible from human beings to exercise these abilities. The atmosphere was dense around population. In Asita's eyes a quiet village was a seething cauldron of emotions; every person - except only small infants - was immersed in a fog of confusion, a dense blanket of fears, wishes, memories, fantasy, and longing. This fog was so thick that the mind could barely pierce it. — Deepak Chopra

We're living for Likes, but we're longing for love. — Craig Groeschel

Description of man: dependence, longing for independence, need. — Blaise Pascal

All you want is to be happy. All your desires, whatever they may be, are longing for happiness. Basically, you wish yourself well ... desire by itself is not wrong. It is life itself, the urge to grow in knowledge and experience. It is choices you make that are wrong. To imagine that some little thing-food, sex, power, fame-will make you happy is to decieve oneself. Only something as vast and deep as your real self can make you truly and lastingly happy. — Nisargadatta Maharaj

I still believe that many Americans have a deep longing for that glorious moment when a sermon is more Biblical than American. — Criss Jami

Longing for love makes a woman beautiful and beloved. — Debasish Mridha

Only a handful of Germans in the Reich had the slightest conception of the eternal and merciless struggle for the German language, German schools, and a German way of life. Only today, when the same deplorable misery is forced on many millions of Germans from the Reich, who under foreign rule dream of their common fatherland and strive, amid their longing, at least to preserve their holy right to their mother tongue, do wider circles understand what it means to be forced to fight for one's nationality. — Adolf Hitler

But to be a parent is to live in the past-present-future all at once. It is to hug your children and be intensely aware of how much smaller they felt last year ... even as you wonder how much bigger they will feel the next. It is to be a time-shifter, to marvel at the budding of their intellect, their verbal dexterity, their sense of humor ... at the same time rewinding and fast-forwarding ... to when they were younger, to when they'll be older. It is to experience longing for the here and now, which I know sounds flaky - sort of like complaining about being homesick when you're already home - but can happen, trust me, when you live in multiple time zones all at once. — Youngme Moon

The desire to transcend one's own ego boundaries, to share completely, even for a moment, the consciousness of another person must be a universal longing. It motivates many of our activities from taking drugs to making love, and lies behind the search for new ways of getting close to one another that is so intense in our society today. — Andrew Weil

We will die soon; and still our "hope is from him." May we not expect that when we face illness He will send angels to carry us to His bosom? We believe that when the pulse is faint and the heart is weak, some angelic messenger shall stand and look with loving eyes upon us and whisper, "Come away!" As we approach the heavenly gate, we expect to hear the welcome invitation, "Come, you who are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world."1 We are expecting harps of gold and crowns of glory; we are hoping soon to be among the company of shining ones before the throne; we are looking forward and longing for the time when we shall be like our glorious Lord - for "We shall see him as he is."2 Then if these are your hopes, O my soul, live for God; live with the desire and resolve to glorify Him from whose grace in your election, redemption, and calling you safely "hope" for the coming glory. — Anonymous

The desire to make the horse happy and the cabman happy, had reached the point of a bizarre longing to take them to bed with him. And that, he knew, was impossible. For Stevie was not mad. It was, as it were, a symbolic longing; and at the same time it was very distinct, because springing from experience, the mother of wisdom. Thus when as a child he cowered in a dark corner scared, wretched, sore, and miserable with the black, black misery of the soul, his sister Winnie used to come along, and carry him off to bed with her, as into a heaven of consoling peace. Stevie, though apt to forget mere facts, such as his name and address for instance, had a faithful memory of sensations. To be taken into a bed of compassion was the supreme remedy, with the only one disadvantage of being difficult of application on a large scale. And looking at the cabman, Stevie perceived this clearly, because he was reasonable. — Joseph Conrad

Something went klunk. Like a nickel dropping in a soda machine. One of those small insights that explains everything. This was puberty for these boys. Adolescence. The first date, the first kiss, the first chance to hold hands with someone special. Delayed, postponed, a decade's worth of longing
while everybody around you celebrates life, you pretend, suppress, inhibit, deprive yourself of you own joy
but finally ultimately, eventually, you find a place where you can have a taste of everything denied. — David Gerrold

Essentially, we fall into grace. By that I mean that a certain mysterious quality reveals itself and cradles us within an intimacy with all of existence. This is something that many people are looking for without even knowing it. Almost everybody is looking for intimacy - a closeness, a sense of union with their own existence or with God, or whatever their concept of higher reality is. All this yearning actually comes from our longing for closeness, intimacy, and true union. When we open to life in this way, we begin to find an inner stability simply because we're no longer at odds with our experience. — Adyashanti

The waltz held the feeling you get when you finish a well-loved book. It left me longing for something I couldn't name. — Louise Miller

When we slow down, quiet the mind, and allow ourselves to feel hungry for something that we do not understand, we are dipping into the abundant well of spiritual longing. — Elizabeth Lesser

It wasn't shared social status or ethnicity that brought Jesus' followers together either, nor was it total agreement on exactly who this Jesus character was - a prophet? The Messiah? The Son of God? No, there is one thing that connected all these dissimilar people together it was a shared sense of need: a hunger, a thirst, a longing. It was the certainty that, when Jesus said He came for the sick, this meant Jesus came for me. — Rachel Held Evans

The act of longing for something will always be more intense than the requiting of it. — Gail Godwin

He and his wife loved each other and brought each other daily pain. Everything else he was doing in his life, even his longing for Lalitha, amounted to little more than flight from circumstance. He and Patty couldn't live together and couldn't imagine living apart. Each time he thought they'd reached the unbearable breaking point, it turned out that there was still further they could go without breaking. — Jonathan Franzen

I was so incredibly nostalgic for a life I knew I'd never, ever have again. — Paige Harbison

It is our genetic nature as a species to believe as young children that our parents and elders are right. We watch them to see what's what. Later on we can judge for ourselves and rebel if need be, but when we're just months old, or a year or two, and a parent looks at us with impatience, or disgust, or disdain, or just leaves us there to cry and doesn't answer us even though we're longing to be embraced and nurtured, we assume that something must be wrong with us. Unfortunately, at that age it's impossible to think there might be something wrong with them. — Jean Liedloff

If only you would kiss me.
Press your lips to mine like a searing iron. Wrap me in your arms as if you were a monarch claiming a kingdom. Hold me close until I warm through to the core. Do this, and I promise to melt into you, no longer a cold and frozen figure in your narrowed sight. How devoted I would be if only your lips burned for mine!
If only you would kiss me. — Richelle E. Goodrich

Comes again the longing, the desire that has no name. Is it for Mrs. Prouty, for a drink, for both: for a party, for youth, for the good times, for dear good drinking and fighting comrades, for football-game girls in the fall with faces like flowers? Comes the longing and it has to do with being fifteen and fifty and with the winter sun striking down into a brick-yard and on clapboard walls rounded off with old hard blistered paint and across a doorsill onto linoleum. Desire has a smell: of cold linoleum and gas heat and the sour piebald bark of crepe myrtle. A good-humored thirty-five-year-old lady takes the air in a back lot in a small town. — Walker Percy

Caught between the longing for love, and the struggle for the legal tender, where the sirens sing and the church bells ring, and the junk man pounds his fender. Where the veterans dream of the fight, fast asleep at the traffic light, and the children solemnly wait for the ice cream vendor. — Jackson Browne

I experienced the happiest moment of my life when you took me in your arms as your wife and pressed me to your heart; when I even think of that moment my heart beats madly and I have a terrible longing for you, and I think I would hug you to death if I had you here now. — Hannah Pakula

Any mother could tell you that a child invades her space from the moment of conception. And for years after, space does not exist. It was one of the things I had missed. I'd even yearned for it. And then Eli died, and I had all the space I had thought I wanted. Not just a little space. Outer space. Galaxies. And I'd floated in it in agony, longing for the days when there had been no such thing. — Amy Harmon

Dependence, she knew, and the longing for more than what you had, led to unhappiness and discontent. — Nora Roberts

Katy, that the whole world can be involved in this madness we call war, and all the while the flowers and the bees and the seasons keep on doing what they must, wise but never weary in their wait for humanity to come to its senses and remember the beauty of life? It is queer, but my love and longing for the world are always deepened by my absence from it; it's wondrous, don't you think, that a person can swing from despair to gleeful hunger, and that even during these dark days there is happiness to be found in the smallest things?) Anyway, — Kate Morton

Her bond with the couple who raised her is fierce and beyond questioning. She cannot name the sensation of losing them as grief. She has no word for longing or despair. — M.L. Stedman

But if these unavoidable separations cause you a measure of pain, they also increase your longing for her, and perhaps that isn't a bad thing, you decide, for you spend your days in the thrall of breathless anticipation, agitated and alert, counting the hours until you can see her and hold her again. Intense. That is the word you use to describe yourself now. You are intense. Your feelings are intense. Your life has become increasingly intense. — Paul Auster

There is also present in every human being, in everyone's biography-although sometimes harrowing cases of systematic neglect, present in the matter of absence, so if longing for that which never was there then too, deeply suspect, should have been. — Paul Ricoeur

But her favorite is the Houdini fantasy. Big Red disagrees with his biographers, who say that he was driven by his longing to shuck off this mortal coil. She knows that he was all the time just searching for a box that could hold him. — Karen Russell

And a woman who held a babe against her bosom said, Speak to us of Children. And he said: Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself. They come through you but not from you, And though they are with you yet they belong not to you. You may give them your love but not your thoughts, For they have their own thoughts. You may house their bodies but not their souls, For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams. You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you. For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday. — Kahlil Gibran

Moving from unbelief, to Evangelicalism, and finally home to the Catholic Church, Professor Holly Ordway reveals how a gifted mind, longing for transcendence, can only appropriate it if it is wholly given by the reach and power of God's grace. — Francis J. Beckwith

It's not that I wait for you.
It's that my arms are doors I cannot close. — Derrick Brown

If thy meditation tends to fill thy note-book with notions, and good sayings, concerning God, and not thy heart with longing after him, and delight in him, for aught I know thy book is as much a Christian as thou (553). — Richard Baxter

The past is devoid of meaning like the present, and a refuge for cowards. — E. M. Forster

Thou hast made us for thyself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it finds its rest in thee. — Augustine Of Hippo

How foolish it is to wear oneself out in vain longing for warmth! Solitude is independence. — Hermann Hesse

But people try love and because they are unconscious ... their longing is good, but their love is full of jealousy, full of possessiveness, full of anger, full of nastiness. Soon they destroy it. Hence for centuries they have depended on marriage. Better to start by marriage so that the law can protect you from destroying it. The society, the government, the court, the policeman, the priest, they will all force you to live in the institution of marriage, and you will be just a slave. If marriage is an institution, you are going to be a slave in it. Only slaves want to live in institutions. — Rajneesh

I remember an insight that taught me much about life. One day I felt that I had everything that I really wanted in life. I had a creative and meaningful work as a therapist and course leader, I had a relationship with a beautiful woman, who I loved and who loved me, I had friend that I trusted and I had money to do what I wanted.
But in spite of all this, I still had a feeling that there was something missing in my life. I was not satisfied. The thirst and longing in my heart was still searching for something more. It made me realize that the deepest pain in my heart was that I was still separated from the Whole and that no outer things or relationships could ease this pain. — Swami Dhyan Giten

My beloved has arrived, but rather than greeting him,
All I can do is bite the corner of my apron with a blank expression-
What an awkward woman am I.
My heart has longed for him as hugely and openly as a full moon
But instead I narrow my eyes, and my glance to him
Is sharp and narrow as the crescent moon.
But then, I'm not the only one who behaves this way.
My mother and my mother's mother were as silly and stumbling as I am when they were girls ...
Still, the love from my heart is overflowing,
As bright and crimson as the heated metal in a blacksmith's forge. — Kim Dong Hwa

Did you miss me while you were looking for yourself out there.. — Train

Accepting a religion, any, is a lot like someone in love. It doesn't matter what the beloved does or says, he or she will get a pass ... Forever. It's easier that way. It's too difficult to accept fault or to admit contradictions or falsehoods. Someone who is religious is in love, and there is no talking them out of it, regardless of what others would take as silly notions or irrational thinking. I no longer try. Life is brief, despite what those longing for an afterlife might really need to believe. Peace and acceptance is something, however, I'll always back, no matter what vehicle it rides in on. — Benjamin Kane Ethridge

I must exist in shadows, while you live under exquisitely blue skies, and yet I don't hate you for the freedom that you take for granted-although I do envy you.
I don't hate you because, after all, you are human, too, and therefore have limitations of your own. Perhaps you are homely, slow-witted or too smart for your own good, deaf or mute or blind, by nature given to despair or to self-hatred, or perhaps you are unusually fearful of Death himself. We all have burdens. On the other hand, if you are better-looking and smarter than I am, blessed with five sharp senses, even more optimistic than I am, with plenty of self-esteem, and if you also share my refusal to be humbled by the Reaper ... well, then I could almost hate you if I didn't know that, like all of us in this imperfect world, you also have a haunted heart and a mind troubled by grief, by loss, by longing. — Dean Koontz

I didn't say, "I'll call you." I didn't hug her because of the wet clothes. Just a quick kiss. Then I turned and left. I made my way quietly down the hallway to the stairwell. I could tell she thought she wasn't going to see me again. I had to admit she might be right. The knowledge was as damp and dispiriting as my sodden clothes. I came to the first floor and looked out at the entranceway of the building. For a second I pictured the way she had hugged me here. It already seemed like a long time ago. I felt an unpleasant mixture of gratitude and longing, streaked with guilt and regret. And in a flash of insight, cutting with cold clarity through the fog of my fatigue, I realized what I hadn't been able to articulate earlier, not even to myself, when she'd asked me what I was afraid of. It had been this, the moment after, when I would come face to face with knowing that it would all end badly, if not this morning, then the next one. Or the one after that. — Barry Eisler

It is awareness of both our shared pain and our longing for happiness that links us to other people and helps us to turn toward them with compassion. — Sharon Salzberg

I know that Dad was an idol to millions who grew up loving his music and his ideals. But to me he wasn't a musician or a peace icon, he was the father I loved and who let me down in so many ways. After the age of five, when my parents separated, I saw him only a handful of times, and when I did he was often remote and intimidating. I grew up longing for more contact with him but felt rejected and unimportant in his life.
... While Dad was fast becoming one of the wealthiest men in his field, Mum and I had very little and she was going out to work to support us. — Julian Lennon

I walk with a dual longing
for life and for death. — Melissa Lee-Houghton

The more formidable the contradiction between inexhaustible life-joy and inevitable fate, the greater the longing which reveals itself in the kingdom of poetry and in the self-created world of dreams hopes to banish the dark power of reality. The gods enjoy eternal youth, and the search for the means of securing it was one of the occupations of the heroes of mythology and the sages, as it was of real adventurers in the middle ages and more recent times ... But the fountain of youth has not been found, and can not be found if it is sought in any particular spot on the earth. Yet it is no fable, no dream-picture; it requires no adept to find it: it streams forth inexhaustible in all living nature. — Ferdinand Cohn

You are all that you are longing for. — Sri Sri Ravi Shankar

Whenever we feel the absence of peace - whenever our unmet longing for joy expresses itself as anxiety, or depression, or fear, or anger, or enslavement to any number of defeating sin patterns or addictions - the emptiness we're feeling and trying to fill is for what our relationship with God, by His loving choice, was always meant to be. Our angst comes from the underlying implications of Ecclesiastes 3:11, where the Scripture says God has put eternity into man's heart. — Matt Chandler

What is clear is that Scripture requires both head and heart, and you need to see it not just as a text but as the very words of God. This will encourage you to pay close attention to the very words he uses, but it will also compel you to feast on those words as light-shedding, wisdom-dispensing, and life-giving counsel from on high.

For all your longing for God to speak, to make his will plain and his plan clear, you should be daily immersed in God's Word. This is his voice, his will, and his plan made known to you. Consider these words, "Make your face shine upon your servant, and teach me your statutes." God's face shines on you when you are learning - experientially - his Word. — Joe Thorn

My longing for you keeps me in this moment My passion gives me courage — Rumi

Within people there is a longing and a desire such that, even if a hundred thousand worlds were theirs to own, still they would find no rest or comfort. They try every trade and craft, studying astronomy, medicine and every other subject, but they reach no completion, for they have not found their true desire. Poets call the Beloved "heart's ease," because there the heart finds ease. How can we find peace and rest in anything but the Beloved?
All these pleasures and pursuits are like a ladder. The rungs of a ladder are not a place to make one's home; they are for passing by. Fortunate are those who learn this. The long road becomes short for them, and they do not waste their lives upon the steps. — Rumi

It is ironic that constructive thinkers are often misunderstood as negative, as they differ from those longing for positivity: constructive thinkers have been conditioned to find positive in negative rather than suffering from the negative in negative. Or as Paul the Apostle wrote, 'I have learned the secret to contentment in any and every circumstance.' He was right. Indeed the Lord is our strength, especially under the commandment to love one another. Otherwise we are nothing and easily thrown about by both our own and other people's mind control in a painful, mental, physical desperation to run from every thought, every thing, and every one not seeming so positive or immediately beneficial to us. — Criss Jami

The few things I'd sacrificed, or put on hold, to be with my husband and
baby were worth it. That broken boy on the beach seemed like a lifetime ago. Years had passed, college and the NFL, marriage and a baby, but every once in a while, when Jude looked over at me and gave me that slow, knowing smile of his, I was that girl in a black string bikini all over again, longing for a boy I never thought could be mine. — Nicole Williams

Best not to tiptoe around what you're yearning for, eyeing it, longing for it ... or you'll miss your life ahead, it read. — Beverly Lewis

I was surfing the Internet for a different sort of education. I surfed for photos of circus freaks and synonyms for the word intercourse and for answers to why staring at the stars in the evening tore my heart with longing. — Maggie Stiefvater

Now that he was navigating, his celestial mood was shattered. Wild, animal thirst for life, mixed with homesick longing for the free airs and the sights and smells of earth-for grass and meat and beer and tea and the human voice-awoke in him. — C.S. Lewis

I did not have any role model. I could not learn anything from the female voice that male poets used, a voice which is more "feminine" than female. Nor could I learn anything from ancient female poetry that only sang about love, the feeling of farewell and longing for others. — Kim Hyesoon

You do see me crossing the meadow
stiff and dead from the mist?
I long for that home,
that home I've never had,
and without any hope
that I'll ever be able to reach it.
For such a home, never touched,
I carry that longing that will
never die, like that meadow dies
stiff and dead from the mist.
You do see me crossing it, full of dread? — Robert Walser

For this is what we do. Put one foot forward and then the other. Lift our eyes to the snarl and smile of the world once more. Think. Act. feel. Add our little consequence to the tides of good and evil that flood and drain the world. Drag our shadowed crosses into the hope of another night. Push our brave hearts into the promise of a new day. With love; the passionate search for truth other than our own. With longing; the pure, ineffable yearning to be saved. For so long as fate keeps waiting, we live on. — Gregory David Roberts

We are a society of disconnected people longing for connections. — Mike Breen

He is saying, as he says extensively in Romans 8, that the whole creation is longing for its exodus, and that when God is all in all even the division between heaven and earth, God's space and human space, will be done away with (as we see also in Revelation 21). Paul's message to the pagan world is the fulfilled-Israel message: the one creator God is, through the fulfilment of his covenant with Israel, reconciling the world to himself. — N. T. Wright