Longing Quotes

• The Creator has not given you a longing to do that which you have no ability to do.

  Orison Swett Marden

  Motivation, Destiny, Champion

  Orison Swett Marden (2016). “How to get what you want”, p.18, FV Éditions

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• It seems to me we can never give up longing and wishing while we are thoroughly alive. There are certain things we feel to be beautiful and good, and we must hunger after them.

  George Eliot

  Beautiful, Witty, Giving Up

  George Eliot (2005). “Four Novels of George Eliot”, p.1147, Wordsworth Editions

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• Prayer is not asking. It is a longing of the soul. It is daily admission of one's weakness. It is better in prayer to have a heart without words than words without a heart.

  Mahatma Gandhi

  Inspirational, Spiritual, Prayer

  Mahatma Gandhi, Mohandas Gandhi, Ronald Duncan (2005). “Gandhi: Selected Writings”, p.240, Courier Corporation

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• If some longing goes unmet, don't be astonished. We call that Life.

  Anna Freud

  Ifs

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• The Heart is like a candle,
  longing to be lit!

  Rumi

  Heart, Lit, Candle

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• I have a desperate longing to have a desperate longing

  Joss Whedon

  Desperate

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• We feel lonely now and then and long for friends and think we should be quite different and happier if we found a friend of whom we might say: “He is the one.” But you, too, will begin to learn that there is much self-deception behind this longing; if we yielded too much to it, it would lead us from the road.

  Vincent Van Gogh

  Lonely, Thinking, Self

  Vincent van Gogh (2014). “Delphi Complete Works of Vincent van Gogh (Illustrated)”, p.1113, Delphi Classics

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• We are the mirror, as well as the face in it.
  We are tasting the taste of eternity this minute.
  We are pain and what cures pain.
  We are the sweet cold water and the jar that pours.
  Soul of the world, no life, nor world remain,
  no beautiful women and men longing.
  Only this ancient love circling the holy black stone of nothing.
  Where the lover is the loved, the horizon and everything within it.

  Rumi

  Beautiful, Sweet, Pain

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• What you feel in Japanese poetry is always entirely longing.

  Robert Bly

  Feels, Poetry Is

  Source: www.utne.com

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• 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.

  Khalil Gibran

  Wisdom, Daughter, Dream

  Prophet (1923) "On Children"

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• Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind.

  Bertrand Russell

  Life, Strong, Fear

  Autobiography prologue (1967)

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• As the presence of those we love is as a double life, so absence, in its anxious longing and sense of vacancy, is as a foretaste of death.

  Anna Brownell Jameson

  Goodbye, Farewell, Love Is

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• Desire and longing are the whips of God.

  Anna Wickham

  Sensual, Desire, Whips

  Anna Wickham (1921). “The Contemplative Quarry ; And, The Man with a Hammer”

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• We are in an age of religious complexity. The simplicity which is in Christ is rarely found among us. In its stead are programs, methods, organizations, and a world of nervous activities which occupy time and attention but can never satisfy the longing of the heart.

  Aiden Wilson Tozer

  Religious, Heart, Organization

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• All plot comes from the character's trying to get something, to achieve something, wanting, desiring, longing.

  Robert Olen Butler

  Character, Trying, Plot

  Robert Olen Butler (2007). “From Where You Dream: The Process of Writing Fiction”, p.139, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

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• My soul is full of longing for the secret of the sea

  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

  Beach, Ocean, Marine

  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1871). “The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow”, p.189

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• 

  Is there anything better than to be longing for something, when you know it is within reach?

  Greta Garbo

  Within Reach, Knows

  "Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• Sometimes when I look at you, I feel I'm gazing at a distant star. It's dazzling, but the light is from tens of thousands of years ago. Maybe the star doesn't even exist any more. Yet sometimes that light seems more real to me than anything.

  Haruki Murakami

  Love, Romantic, Dream

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• God speaks to each of us as he makes us, then walks with us silently out of the night. These are the words we dimly hear: You, sent out beyond your recall, go to the limits of your longing. Embody me. Flare up like a flame and make big shadows I can move in. Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final. Don't let yourself lose me. Nearby is the country they call life. You will know it by its seriousness. Give me your hand.

  Rainer Maria Rilke

  Country, Moving, Night

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• Feeling and longing are the motive forces behind all human endeavor and human creations.

  Albert Einstein

  Inspiration, Being Alone, Creativity

  Albert Einstein (2010). “The Ultimate Quotable Einstein”, p.329, Princeton University Press

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• I am restless. I am athirst for faraway 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.

  Rabindranath Tagore

  Distance, Adventure, Wings

  Rabindranath Tagore, Mohit Kumar Ray (2007). “Poems”, p.59, Atlantic Publishers & Dist

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• Only longing can fill with more of itself.

  Virginia Woolf

  Chaos

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• The nonconformist here may be "beat down" by life but still has a beauty in his or her longing for freedom and for an awakening of the mind.

  William S. Burroughs

  Mind, May, Awakening

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