Longing Quotes - Page 28

• I've always been in this sort of perpetual state of existential longing. I feel like something's missing.

  Juliana Hatfield

  Missing, Existential, States

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• Life is a process by which a few desperate longings morph into a thousand meaningless wants.

  Robert Breault

  Life, Want, Desperate

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• A king is he who has laid fear aside and the base longings of an evil heart; whom ambition unrestrained and the fickle favor of the reckless mob move not.

  Seneca the Younger

  Kings, Moving, Heart

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• Longing, the hope for fulfillment, is the one unwavering passion of the world's commerce.

  E. L. Doctorow

  Passion, World, Fulfillment

  E.L. Doctorow (2011). “Jack London, Hemingway, and the Constitution:: Selected Essays, 1977-1992”, p.34, Random House

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• Down inside we have a longing for God-what Pascal called "the vacuum which God left behind.

  Billy Graham

  God, Vacuums, Pascal

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• Alas, human vices, however horrible one might imagine them to be, contain the proof (were it only in their infinite expansion) of man's longing for the infinite; but it is a longing that often takes the wrong route. It is my belief that the reason behind all culpable excesses lies in this depravation of the sense of the infinite.

  Charles Baudelaire

  Lying, Men, Vices

  "Selected Letters of Charles Baudelaire: The Conquest of Solitude".

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• I had a longing for ritual, something I could cling to, a routine to make me feel well and contented. I hoped that reading Bible commentaries and theological critiques would nudge me closer to some kind of absolute that I could hold up as a torch to light my way.

  Jack Dee

  Reading, Light, Torches

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• The longing for a destiny is no nowhere stronger than in our romantic life. All too often forced to share our bed with those who cannot fathom our soul, can we not be forgiven if we believe ourselves fated to stumble one day upon the man or woman of our dreams.

  Alain de Botton

  Dream, Believe, Destiny

  Alain De Botton (1993). “On Love”, Grove/Atlantic

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• Be short in all religious exercises. Better leave the people longing than loathing.

  Nathanael Emmons

  Religious, Exercise, People

  Nathanael Emmons (1842). “Autobiography. Memoir. The Christian ministry”, p.137

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• Truth is simple, but Illusion makes it infinitely intricate. The person is rare who possesses an insatiable longing for Truth; the rest allow Illusion to bind them ever more and more.

  Meher Baba

  Simple, Illusion, Truth Is

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• The pangs of pain, of failure, in this mortal lot, are the birth-throes of transition to better things. We are separated for a time by the indifference of space and our blindness which particularizes and isolates us. But in us is a longing for unity.

  John Elof Boodin

  Pain, Space, Unity

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• Art is the pure realization of religious feeling, capacity for faith, longing for God. ... The ability to believe is our outstanding quality, and only art adequately translates it into reality. But when we assuage our need for faith with an ideology we court disaster.

  Gerhard Richter

  Religious, Art, Believe

  Gerhard Richter, Dietmar Elger, Hans-Ulrich Obrist (2009). “Gerhard Richter: writings 1961-2007”, Distributed Art Pub Inc

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• ... We must remember that there's more than one story and plot in every novel. There are at least as many stories as there are main characters, and each of these stories has to have multiple plots to keep it going - blood and bone, nerve and tissue, forgotten longing and unknown events.

  Walter Mosley

  Character, Writing, Blood

  Walter Mosley (2009). “This Year You Write Your Novel”, p.28, Hachette UK

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• Sacrifice is a state of mind in which our thoughts turn with longing [toward Heaven, the Ancestors], It is the supreme expression of loyalty, love, and respect.

  Xunzi

  Loyalty, Sacrifice, Expression

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• We all start out with the same alphabet. We are all unique. Talent is not the most important thing --- discipline and dedication are. Craft can be learned but desire and longing are innate. Despite the demands of school and just being young, try to write SOMETHING every day --- a description, a captured emotion, a simile, a metaphor. Read, for crying out loud! A writer must read the way a ball player must go to the ballfield every day to practice. Everything is possible in this world of ours--- and so's publication.

  Robert Cormier

  Writing, School, Unique

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• People want the right to die at a time of their own choosing. Too many families have watched helplessly as a relative dies slowly, longing for death.

  Polly Toynbee

  People, Want, Right To Die

  "Cardinals, bishops and doctors must not deny us our last rights" by Polly Toynbee, www.theguardian.com. May 11, 2006.

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• I am far from perfect, but I have something else. I heard that people in the industry are longing for more personality and diversity. Perhaps I am more a 'character' than a model.

  Saskia de Brauw

  Character, People, Perfect

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• You're always trying to balance your understanding of who you are and what you need, and your longing and imaginings of freedom.

  Bernardine Dohrn

  Always Trying, Understanding, Balance

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• Sometimes I read a biography of some tempestuous artist and find myself longing for fireworks! booze! bloody fights!; I do think that life must be so much more thrilling when you're actively miserable.

  Lauren Groff

  Fighting, Artist, Thinking

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• I was five years old when I wrote my first song. It was out of longing for my father that I wrote it.

  Shmuel Yosef Agnon

  Song, Father, Years

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• Writers are greatly respected. The intelligent public is wonderfully patient with them, continues to read them, and endures disappointment after disappointment, waiting to hear from art what it does not hear from theology, philosophy, social theory, and what it cannot hear from pure science. Out of the struggle at the center has come an immense, painful longing for a broader, more flexible, fuller, more coherent, more comprehensive account of what we human beings are, who we are and what this life is for.

  Saul Bellow

  Art, Disappointment, Philosophy

  Saul Bellow (2015). “There Is Simply Too Much to Think About: Collected Nonfiction”, p.216, Penguin

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• I have a longing for fiction - to try to believe in it and to disappear into it.

  Karl Ove Knausgard

  Believe, Trying, Fiction

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• That powers my desire to write: the sense of how quickly everything on the surface of life can be cut away and you can suddenly be inside the most inner part of the most inner life of a person. What does it feel like there, and what are the regrets and sensations and longings, and what is the music of it?

  Nicole Krauss

  Regret, Writing, Cutting

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• 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

  Dream, Children, Struggle

  Song: The Pretender, Album: The Pretender, 1976

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• The human longings that are deep inside of us never go away. They exist across cultures; they exist throughout life. When people were first made, our deepest longing was to know and be known. And after the Fall, when we all got weird, it's still our deepest longing - but it's now also our deepest fear.

  John Ortberg

  Fall, People, Going Away

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