Quotes about Longing

I think it's such a clever idea, that you fall in love when you're 16, and then you have this fantasy about that person for the rest of your life.

Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in a lifetime therefore we must be saved by hope.

Thou I cannot so freely say, My heart is with thee, my soul longeth after thee ; yet can I say, I long for such a longing heart (648).

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).

St. Augustine admits in his Confessions: "Late have I loved you, Beauty so very ancient and so ever new. Late have I loved you! You were within, but I was without.

A heaven you created by yourself will never be heaven for long.

What we all desire and need from one another, of course, is that life energy called eros! It always draws, creates, and connects things.

Jesus seems to often find love in people who might not have received much love themselves. Perhaps their deep longing for it became their capacity to both receive it and give it.

In The Odyssey, the stirring of longing and dissatisfaction is symbolized by the collapse of Troy and the inability of most of the Greeks to return home. It seems they had forgotten about home, had made home in a foreign land, or were not that determined to return home (which are all excellent descriptions of the typical detours or dead ends on the spiritual journey!).

The common word for this inner abiding place of the Spirit, which is also a place of longing, has usually been the word soul. We have our soul already—we do not "get" it by any purification process

God will always give you exactly what you truly want and desire. Desire deeply, desire yourself, desire God, desire everything good, true and beautiful.

Longing for the ideal while criticizing the real is evidence of immaturity. On the other hand, settling for the real without striving for the ideal is complacency. Maturity is living with the tension.