These longing quotes will inspire you. Longing, a strong desire especially for something unattainable or a yearning desire.
A collection of motivating, happy, and encouraging longing quotes, longing sayings, and longing proverbs.
Best Longing Quotes
- “The Creator has not given you a longing to do that which you have no ability to do.” ~ Orison Swett Marden
- “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
- “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
- “Like billowing clouds, Like the incessant gurgle of the brook The longing of the spirit can never be stilled.” ~ Hildegard of Bingen
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“If some longing goes unmet, don’t be astonished. We call that Life.” ~ Anna Freud
- “My soul is full of longing for the secret of the sea” ~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
- “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
- “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
- “The Heart is like a candle,
longing to be lit!” ~ Rumi -
“So come to the pond, or the river of your imagination, or the harbor of your longing, and put your lips to the world. And live your life.” ~ Mary Oliver
- “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
- “Is there anything better than to be longing for something, when you know it is within reach?” ~ Greta Garbo
- “The distant soul can shake the distant friend’s soul and make the longing felt, over untold miles.” ~ John Masefield
- “What hidden, hoarded longings there are in all of us.” ~ John Steinbeck
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“Feeling and longing are the motive forces behind all human endeavor and human creations.” ~ Albert Einstein
- “My love is as a fever, longing still.” ~ William Shakespeare
- “I don’t know what they are called, the spaces between seconds– but I think of you always in those intervals.” ~ Salvador Plascencia
- “Only longing can fill with more of itself.” ~ Virginia Woolf
- “If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.” ~ Antoine de Saint-Exupery
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“All language is a longing for home.” ~ Rumi
- “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
- “The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them,and what came through them was longing. These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols,breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.” ~ C. S. Lewis
- “Happiness is a myth we seek,
If manifested surely irks;
Like river speeding to the plain,
On its arrival slows and murks.
For man is happy only in
His aspiration to the heights;
When he attains his goal, he cools
And longs for other distant flights.” ~ Khalil Gibran -
“Deep in my heart I’m concealing things that I’m longing to say. Scared to confess what I’m feeling – frightened you’ll slip away.” ~ Madonna Ciccone
- “How do you stop longing for what you absolutely know you can’t get? Which really means: How do you absolutely know you can’t-and won’t-get it, not ever? How do you pinch out that wisp of feeble, ruthless hope?” ~ Leigh Newman
- “I believe in the immortality of the soul because I have within me immortal longings.” ~ Helen Keller
- “Nature has planted in our minds an insatiable longing to see the truth.” ~ Marcus Tullius Cicero
- “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
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“There is a third dimension to traveling, the longing for what is beyond.” ~ Jan Myrdal
- “Women have always been the strong ones of the world. The men are always seeking from women a little pillow to put their heads down on. They are always longing for the mother who held them as infants.” ~ Coco Chanel
- “In prayer it is better to have a heart without words than words without a heart.” ~ John Bunyan
- “I am fond of them, of the inferior beings of the abyss, of those who are full of longing.” ~ Richard Wagner
- “It is the haunted premises of longing that the true love song inhabits. It is a howl in the void, for love and for comfort and it lives on the lips of the child crying for his mother. It is the song of the lover in need of her loved one, the raving of the lunatic supplicant petitioning his God…The love song is the sound of our endeavors to become God-like, to rise up and above the earthbound and the mediocre.” ~ Nick Cave
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“Creativity is a space for solitary longing, the desire to be elsewhere in space and time, to be in a new ideal world where life is as it should be.” ~ Chenjerai Hove
- “I take no pride in hopeless longing; I wouldn’t hold a stillborn aspiration. I’d want to have it, to make it, to live it.” ~ Ayn Rand
- “Happiness is the longing for repetition.” ~ Milan Kundera
- “Maybe love was superstition, a prayer we said to keep the truth of loneliness at bay. I tilted my head back. The stars looked like they were close together, when really they were millions of miles apart. In the end, maybe love just meant longing for something impossibly bright and forever out of reach.” ~ Leigh Bardugo
- “I love borders. August is the border between summer and autumn; it is the most beautiful month I know. Twilight is the border between day and night, and the shore is the border between sea and land. The border is longing: when both have fallen in love but still haven’t said anything. The border is to be on the way. It is the way that is the most important thing.” ~ Tove Jansson , Longing quotes love
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“Sacrifices are concerned with the feelings of devotion and longing.” ~ Xunzi
- “O, it’s die we must, but it’s live we can, And the marvel of earth and sun Is all for the joy of woman and man And the longing that makes them one.” (Between the Dusk of a Summer Night, 13-16)” ~ William Ernest Henley
- “Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself. They came through you but not from you and though they are with you yet they belong not to you.” ~ Khalil Gibran
- “People of this world are deluded. They’re always longing for something – always, in a word, seeking.” ~ Bodhidharma
- “The desire is thy prayers; and if thy desire is without ceasing, thy prayer will also be without ceasing. The continuance of your longing is the continuance of your prayer.” ~ Saint Augustine
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“Prayer is not asking. It is a longing of the soul.” ~ Mahatma Gandhi
- “Fear of the future and longing for the past are major factors which impede appropriate action.” ~ Brenda Shoshanna
- “There is no past that we can bring back by longing for it.” ~ Judi Dench
- “But for my sighs, I should be drowned by my tears; and but for my tears, I should be burned by my sighs.” ~ Ibn al-Farid
- “There is 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
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“Whenever a man has cast a longing eye on offices, a rottenness begins in his conduct.” ~ Thomas Jefferson
- “Free’ is more of that ‘familiarity breeds contempt’ kind of thing. It’s about saying ‘Wait, I’m longing for something more than I have and I don’t know what it is that I want, but I know I want it.’ It has nothing to do with what I’m going through, personally.” ~ Jon Crosby
- “A book is good company. It is full of conversation without loquacity. It comes to your longing with full instruction, but pursues you never.” ~ Henry Ward Beecher
- “We gain nothing by being with such as ourselves. We encourage one another in mediocrity. I am always longing to be with men more excellent than myself.” ~ Charles Lamb
- “I think, then, that man, after having satisfied his first longing for facts, wanted something fuller – some grouping, some adaptation to his capacity and experience, of the links of this vast chain of events which his sight could not take in.” ~ Alfred de Vigny
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“Ardent love or desire introduced, as passionately longing to please and glorify the Divine Being, to be in every respect conformed to him, and in that way to enjoy him.” ~ David Brainerd
- “Besides the pleasure derived from acquired knowledge, there lurks in the mind of man, and tinged with a shade of sadness, an unsatisfactory longing for something beyond the present, a striving towards regions yet unknown and unopened.” ~ Wilhelm von Humboldt
- “Hence the end of the world should be awaited with all longing by all believers.” ~ William Ames
- “Even the pyramids might one day disappear, but not the Palestinians longing for their homeland.” ~ Eduard Shevardnadze
- “The act of longing for something will always be more intense than the requiting of it.” ~ Gail Godwin
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“All lovers live by longing, and endure: Summon a vision and declare it pure.” ~ Theodore Roethke
- “The lonely wanderer, who watches by the seashore the waves that roll between him and his home, talks of cruel facts, material barriers that, just because they are material, and not ideal, shall be the irresistible foes of his longing heart.” ~ Josiah Royce , Longing quotes home
- “In these times – where social appearance is more important than spiritual substance – what has become our longing to change is really the unconscious desire to control not just the shape of our bodies (according to prevailing values) but to dominate our environment as well, regardless of the cost.” ~ Guy Finley
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“My longing to improve my looks via The Body Shop is being replaced by my longing to improve my looks via Photoshop.” ~ Gina Barreca
- “We are all strangers in a strange land, longing for home, but not quite knowing what or where home is. We glimpse it sometimes in our dreams, or as we turn a corner, and suddenly there is a strange, sweet familiarity that vanishes almost as soon as it comes…” ~ Madeleine L’Engle
- “Death is the great hope of all life; the desire to expend itself; to be used and consumed by its own longing for itself.” ~ Bryant H. McGill
- “Longing is like the rosy dawn. After the dawn out comes the sun. Longing is followed by the vision of God.” ~ Ramakrishna
