Quotes about Longing

Our most meaningful relationships are based on a longing for expansion rather than a preoccupation with comfort and security. To live exuberantly—to fully know and be fully known by another—we must be prepared to illuminate the dark spots in our most intimate relationships and in our selves.

It's a longing, an aching to complete ourselves, to unite with that which makes us whole. We are longing for God the way a soldier longs for his wife faraway. It a relentless homesickness that, however desperately we try, will accept no substitutes.

The modern era has brought up immense conveniences but at what price. The human heart is desperate for something more than a quicker serving of popcorn.

There is a fragrance in the air, a certain passage of a song, an old photograph falling out from the pages of a book, the sound of somebody's voice in the hall that makes your heart leap and fills your eyes with tears. Who can say when or how it will be that something easters up out of the dimness to remind us of a time before we were born and after we will die?

Like Adam, we have all lost Paradise; and yet we carry Paradise around inside of us in the form of a longing for, almost a memory of, a blessedness that is no more, or the dream of a blessedness that may someday be again.

It was the upward-reaching and fathomlessly hungering, heart-breaking love for the beauty of the world at its most beautiful, and, beyond that, for that beauty east of the sun and west of the moon which is past the reach of all but our most desperate desiring and is finally the beauty of Beauty itself, of Being itself and what lies at the heart of Being.

The word longing comes from the same root as the word long in the sense of length in either time or space and also the word belong, so that in its full richness to long suggests to yearn for a long time for something that is a long way off and something that we feel we belong to and that belongs to us. The longing for home is so universal a form of longing that there is even a special word for it, which is of course homesickness.

Your father lies beneath a stone,' old Aedwen mumbles, dozing at her wheel, and Godric thinks how it's a stone as well they're all beneath. The stone is need and hurt and gall and tongue-tied longing, for that's the stone that kinship always bears, yet the loss of it would press more grievous still.

Man wants three things; life, knowledge, and love.

"She satisfies my ideal." Every person carries within his heart a blueprint of the one he loves; what appears to be "love at first sight" is often the fulfillment of a desire and the realization of a dream.

The sadness it feels in attaining any happiness less than the infinite—all these constitute the mating call of God to the soul.

A tiny architect works inside the human heart drawing sketches of the ideal love from the people it sees, from the books it reads, from its hopes and daydreams, in the fond hope that the eye may one day see the ideal and the hand touch it. Life becomes satisfying the moment the dream is seen walking, and the person appears as the incarnation of all that one loved.