105 Quotes For Inspiration And Wisdom

In our fast-paced world, where moments of introspection often get lost amidst daily chaos, sometimes all it takes is a few poignant words to shift our perspective and rejuvenate our spirits. Quotes, with their timeless wisdom and succinct elegance, have the unique ability to distill complex life truths into bite-sized reflections. Whether you’re seeking motivation to tackle your next challenge or looking for pearls of wisdom to contemplate on a quiet evening, our curated collection of 105 quotes promises to spark inspiration and guide you toward a deeper understanding of yourself and the world around you. Dive in and let these words of wisdom illuminate your path.

1. “The man who is extremely and dangerously hungry has no other interest but food. Capacities not useful for the satisfying of hunger are pushed into the background. 'But what happens to man's desires when there is plenty of food and his belly in chronically filled? At once, other (and higher) needs emerge and these, rather than the psychological hungers, dominate the organism.” - Betty Friedan

2. “Earth provides enough to satisfy every man's needs, but not every man's greed.” - Mahatma Gandhi

3. “Our labour preserves us from three great evils -- weariness, vice, and want.” - Voltaire

4. “Every age, and especially our own, stands in need of a Diogenes; but the difficulty is in finding men who have the courage to be one, and men who have the patience to endure one.” - Jean le Rond d'Alembert

5. “It is often much harder to get rid of books than to acquire them. They stick to us in that pact of need and oblivion we make with them, witnesses to a moment in our lives we will never see again. While they are still there, it is part of us.” - Carlos María Domínguez

6. “My heart only ever had one thought, one want. One need. Despite all, in spite of all...All my heart has ever wanted is you.” - Stephanie Laurens

7. “Dimples crinkle up the skin near his lips. I will not look at his lips. How can he never have used those? That’s a crime against humanity right there.” - Carrie Jones

8. “Not even need and love can defeat fate...” - Ursula K. Le Guin

9. “What sort of love is permeated by jealousy? You are jealous because you are unaware that everything you need is inside you.” - Peter Deunov

10. “As I sat down, though, I realized that you can get used to certain luxuries that you start to think they're necessities, but when you have to forgo them, you come to see that you don't need them after all. There was a big difference between needing things and wanting things--though a lot of people had trouble telling the two apart--and at the ranch, I could see, we have pretty much everything we'd need but precious little else.” - Jeannette Walls

11. “Our frustration is greater when we have much and want more than when we have nothing and want some. We are less dissatisfied when we lack many things than when we seem to lack but one thing.” - Eric Hoffer

12. “Having someone wonder where you are when you don't come home at night is a very old human need. ” - Margaret Mead

13. “In a strong relationship, you should love your companion more than you need them.” - Steve Maraboli

14. “I want to kiss you.” Jace’s whisper pulled me from my thoughts and I glanced up to find his eyes blazing with raw need. “Just because Marc won’t touch you doesn’t mean I shouldn’t. Right? I don’t have that kind of self-control, and honestly, I don’t see the point in it. Are you supposed to be impressed by how long we can go without touching you? ’Cause if that’s the game we’re playing, I think I’d rather lose.” - Rachel Vincent

15. “This man has conquered the world! What have you done?"The philosopher replied without an instant's hesitation, "I have conquered the need to conquer the world.” - Steven Pressfield

16. “In the desert, the only god is a well.” - Vera Nazarian

17. “It's hard to save the world when you can't save yourself” - Carrie Jones

18. “But if you tame me, then weshall need each other. To me, you will be unique in all the world. To you, Ishall be unique in all the world.” - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

19. “as the needs of all living things must, we have proved that it is a very safe thing to trust in the Lord our God.” - Amy Carmichael

20. “Depend on it. God's work done in God's way will never lack God's supply. He is too wise a God to frustrate His purposes for lack of funds, and He can just as easily supply them ahead of time as afterwards, and He much prefers doing so.” - Hudson Taylor

21. “You're good salesman, if you make people buyproduct they don't need.” - Toba Beta

22. “I'm oxygen and he's dying to breathe.” - Tahereh Mafi

23. “Her face felt like it was scattered in pieces and she could not keep it straight. The feeling was a whole lot worse than being hungry for any dinner, yet it was like that. I want--I want--I want--was all that she could think about--but just what this real want was she did no know.” - Carson McCullers

24. “All individuals have moral deficiencies, and when introducing these to reality one not only strengthens himself but also the confidence of others in the human exigency for Christ due to a reflection throughout the body of Christ.” - Criss Jami

25. “Need is choice come to fruition.” - S. Kelley Harrell

26. “Adventure is a need.” - Toba Beta

27. “When you don't know where you're going, maybe it wasn't such a bad thing to have more than you need.” - Sarah Dessen

28. “I don't wanna need you because I can't have you.” - Clint Eastwood

29. “There is/no reasoning with need.” - Claudia Rankine

30. “Marty, my mother used to say "Never get greedy with God." I think what she meant was "Don't dare ask for more if you already have what you need." ” - James Patterson

31. “As if I feared that the scope of what I could feel and imagine was being quietly limited by the world within a world, the internet. The things outside of the web were becoming further from me, and everything inside it seemed piercingly relevant. The blogs of strangers had to be read daily, and people nearby who had no web presence were becoming almost cartoonlike, as if they were missing a dimension. It was just happening, like time, like geography. The web seemed so inherently endless that it didn't occur to me what wasn't there. My appetite for pictures and videos and news and music was so gigantic now that if something was shrinking, something immesurable, how would I notice?...Most of life is offline, and I think it always will be; eating and aching and sleeping and loving happen in the body. But it's not impossible to imagine loosing my appetite for those things; they aren't always easy, and they take so much time.” - Miranda July

32. “A need for revenge can burn long and hot. Especially if every glance in a mirror reinforces it.” - Suzanne Collins

33. “Why now? Why not? Live or die, a man and a woman need love. There is a need in the race. We need to share. To belong. Perhaps you will die before the year is out. But remember this: to have may be taken from you, to have had never. Far better to have tasted love before dying, than to die alone.” - David Gemmell

34. “People tend to criticize their spouse most loudly in the area where they themselves have the deepest emotional need.” - Gary Chapman

35. “Don't you see what's happened? You wanted to be in love again. To feel that feeling where a man you hardly know gazes into your eyes and seems to be the only human being who ever understood the real you.” - Nancy Horan

36. “Sometimes you don't even know what you want until you find out you can't have it.” - Meghan O'Rourke

37. “And I need you, my love," he said. "I need you so much that I panic when I think that perhaps I will not be able to persuade you to come back with me to Enfield. I need you so much that I cannot quite contemplate the rest of my life if it must be lived without you. I need you so much that—Well, the words speak for themselves. I need you.""To look after Augusta?" she said. She dared not hear what he was surely saying. She dared not hope. "To look after Enfield? To provide you with an heir?""Yes," he said, and her heart sank like a stone to be squashed somewhere between her slippers and the parlor carpet."And to be my friend and my confidant and my comfort. And to be my lover.” - Mary Balogh

38. “Severing our young and fragile friendship was a sad ordeal, but sadder still was the fact that this friend found it so difficult to respond to my immediate need, unlike a dreamed boy who always afforded me easy comfort. I couldn’t understand what was so hard about reaching out to hug someone. But judging by Gregory’s uncomfortable conduct I had to assume it was an honest trial.” - Richelle Goodrich

39. “The world is perishing for lack of the knowledge of God and the Church is famishing for want of His Presence.” - A.W. Tozer

40. “I am beginning to remember what it means to need things. Laughter. Companionship. Love. "He leant forward and pressed his forehead to mine. "And I need you, Merit.” - Chloe Neill

41. “Right, well, we've got to work out what we need. We've got to work out what we need, how we get it, and what we need to get to get what we need.” - Derek Landy

42. “You aren't alive if you aren't in need.” - Henry Cloud

43. “We wanted a family so bad, all of us. And we just grabbed each another and made us one. Simple as that.” - Cynthia Rylant

44. “I ask for nothing. / In return I give All. / There is no earning my Love. / No work needed, no effort / Save to listen to what is already heard, / To see what is already seen. / To know what is already known. / Do I seem to ask too little? / Would you give although I ask not? / Then this you can give me and I will accept. / I will take your heart. / You will find it waiting for you / When you return.” - Ki Longfellow

45. “You have to really want and need it before you earn it.” - Toba Beta

46. “They adore you beacause they think you offer up your friendship and ask for nothing in return. But that's not true-' He took a deep breath. 'You do ask for something. You ask that we never expect you to need us.” - Kamila Shamsie

47. “We teleported," Issie finishes. "Like in Star Trek or Harry Potter, sort of. No! Like in Dr. Who in that episode with the Sontarans and the brilliant human boy, or really any Dr. Who ever if you think of the Tardis! Holy canola! That is just the coolest thing ever! Wowie, wow, wow!” - Carrie Jones

48. “Service to others in their time of need is a privilege and an honor.” - Harley King

49. “And suddenly I know I have to go. But this time without being chased by the Brigadier, without experiencing the kindness of a postman from Yass, and without taking along a Cadet who will change the way I breath for the rest of my life.” - Melina Marchetta

50. “Well, if you can't have what you want, you could try to want what you have.” - Gillian Shields

51. “How we need that security. How we need another soul to cling to, another body to keep us warm. To rest and trust; to give your soul in confidence: I need this, I need someone to pour myself into.” - Sylvia Plath

52. “Authors always carry a means for scribbling and an excuse for pausing, often inopportunely, to record those fleeting sparks of creative fancy that might otherwise vanish like a wisp in the wind if ignored.  Writing is a jealous and needy lover.” - Richelle E. Goodrich

53. “Technology doesn’t change people’s basic needs or their natures.” - Priya Ardis

54. “[...] De toute façon, les hommes sont trop plates!' 'Tu les aimes, pourtant.' 'J'en ai besoin! C'est pas pareil!” - Michel Tremblay

55. “The very first evidence of awakening grace is dissatisfaction with one's self and self-effort and a longing for deliverance from chains of sin that have bound the soul. To own frankly that I am lost and guilty is the prelude to life and peace. It is not a question of a certain depth of grief and sorrow, but simply the recognition and acknowledgment of need that lead one to turn to Christ for refuge. None can perish who put their trust in Him. His grace superabounds above all our sin, and His expiatory work on the cross is so infinitely precious to God that it fully meets all our uncleanness and guilt.” - Harry Ironside

56. “Your needs are overwhelming? You can’t depend on yourself or others to meet them? You don’t even know what they are? Then need nothing.” - Caroline Knapp

57. “I take my time because I love how it feels to carry her, the way she needs me, the way I need to protect her.” - Jessica Sorensen

58. “Yes, of course we could all use some help. There isn't a person alive without a need. So don't ask the silly question, just figure out how you're going to help and do it!” - Richelle E. Goodrich

59. “Whenever we have excess, giving should be our natural response. It should be the automatic decision, the obvious thing to do in light of Scripture and human need.” - Randy Alcorn

60. “Max.God, but she was stubborn. And tough. And closed in. Closed off. Except whenshe was holding Angel, or ruffling the Gasman’s hair, or pushing somethingcloser to Iggy’s hand so he could find it easily without knowing anyone hadhelped him. Or when she was trying to untangle Nudge’s mane of hair.Or-sometimes-when she was looking at Fang.He shifted on the hard ground, a half-dozen flashes of memory cyclingthrough his brain. Max looking at him and laughing. Max leaping off a cliff,snapping out her wings, flying off, so incredibly powerful and graceful thatit took his breath away.Max punching someone’s lights out, her face like stone.Max kissing that weiner Sam on Anne’s front porch.Gritting his teeth, Fang rolled onto his side.Max kissing him on the beach, after Ari had kicked Fang’s butt.Just now, her mouth soft under his.He wished she were here, if not next to him, then somewhere in the cave, sohe could hear her breathing.It was going to be hard to sleep without that tonight.” - James Patterson

61. “The art of our necessities is strangeThat can make vile things precious.” - William Shakespeare

62. “Can I be blamed for wanting a real body, to put my arms around? Without it I too am disembodied. I can listen to my own heartbeat against the bedsprings...but there’s something dead about it, something deserted.” - Margaret Atwood

63. “I just want my stories to be mine.” - Lidia Yuknavitch

64. “The need in me beautiful is to look back on you forever!!” - Abhijeet Sawant

65. “I did not grasp all these details - and many more - right away. They came to my notice with time and as a result of necessity. I would be in the direst of dire straits, facing a bleak future, when some small thing, some detail, would transform itself and appear in my mind in a new light. It would no longer be the small thing it was before, but the most important thing in the world, the thing that would save my life. This happened time and again. How true it is that necessity is the mother of invention, how very true.” - Yann Martel

66. “Need' now means wanting someone else's money. 'Greed' means wanting to keep your own. 'Compassion' is when a politician arranges the transfer.” - Joseph Sobran

67. “Essential to life, is desiring the things that you need, than needing the things you desire.” - Anthony Liccione

68. “How many more cars, clothes, toys and trinkets do we really need before we wake up and realize that half the world goes to bed every night with empty stomachs and naked bodies?” - K.P. Yohannan

69. “Women need a reason to have sex, while men just need an angle” - Josh Stern

70. “Every woman needs a man.” - Missy Lyons

71. “Because we lack a divine Center our need for security has led us into an insane attachment to things. We really must understand that the lust for affluence in contemporary society is psychotic. It is psychotic because it has completely lost touch with reality. We crave things we neither need nor enjoy. 'We buy things we do not want to impress people we do not like'. Where planned obsolescence leaves off, psychological obsolescence takes over. We are made to feel ashamed to wear clothes or drive cars until they are worn out. The mass media have convinced us that to be out of step with fashion is to be out of step with reality. It is time we awaken to the fact that conformity to a sick society is to be sick. Until we see how unbalanced our culture has become at this point, we will not be able to deal with the mammon spirit within ourselves nor will we desire Christian simplicity.” - Richard J. Foster

72. “I'm starting to think this world is just a place for us to learn that we need each other more than we want to admit.” - Richelle E. Goodrich

73. “Whether they are raised in indigenous or modern culture, there are two things that people crave: the full realization of their innate gifts, and to have these gifts approved, acknowledged, and confirmed. There are countless people in the West whose efforts are sadly wasted because they have no means of expressing their unique genius. In the psyches of such people there is an inner power and authority that fails to shine because the world around them is blind to it.” - Malidoma Patrice Somé

74. “Whatever you want, at any moment, someone else is getting it. Whatever you have, someone else is longing for.” - Laura Lippman

75. “Love—the desire to love and be loved, to hold and be held, to give love even if your experience as a recipient has been compromised or incomplete—is the constant on the continuum of hunger, it's what links the anorexic to the garden-variety dieter, it's the persistent pulse of need and yearning behind the reach for food, for sex, for something.” - Caroline Knapp

76. “...while God has done his part in creating a world capable of providing what we need, we have not done our part in the stewardship of it, in seeing that it gets to the end of the line, to the poorest and neediest--the children.” - Wess Stafford

77. “I realized that you can get so used to certain luxuries that you start to think they’re necessities, but when you have to forgo them, you come to see that you don’t need them after all. There was a big difference between needing things and wanting things—though a lot of people had trouble telling the two apart—and at the ranch, I could see, we’d have pretty much everything we’d need but precious little else.” - Jeannette Walls

78. “We hit and we kept on hitting; we were allowed to be what we were, frightened and vengeful — little animals, clawing at what we needed.” - Justin Torres

79. “Contentment comes from wanting what we need, not needing what we want.” - Wayne Gerard Trotman

80. “The world is already yours - why try to conquer it?” - Rasheed Ogunlaru

81. “Am I ever angry or frustrated? I only feel angry sometimes when I see waste, when things that we waste are what people need, things that would save them from dying. Frustrated? No, never.” - Mother Teresa

82. “I want you to stay. I need you to go.” - Kimberly Sabatini

83. “All I ever wanted from you was to know that I was wanted by you.  That would have changed everything.” - Richelle E. Goodrich

84. “This may be a thing you neither want nor need," she said. "But I'd rather you have it, wishing didn't, than not have it and wish you did.” - Kristin Cashore

85. “...You know something, don't you?""I know lots of things--your inquiry needs to be more specific.""Just answer the question.""True/false or multiple choice?” - Neal Shusterman

86. “Love never comes just a little bit at a time, I thought, as I watched him, absorbed in contemplation of the Virgin. The previous day, the world made sense, even without love's presence. But now we needed each other in order to see the true brilliance of things.” - Paulo Coelho

87. “You need some coffee, don't you?""Yes, I've only had a gallon.” - John Grisham

88. “God is not glorified when we keep for ourselves (no matter how thankfully) what we ought to be using to alleviate the misery of unevangelized, uneducated, unmedicated, and unfed millions. The evidence that many professing Christians have been deceived by this doctrine is how little they give and how much they own. God has prospered them. And by an almost irresistible law of consumer culture (baptized by a doctrine of health, wealth, and prosperity) they have bought bigger (and more) houses, newer (and more) cars, fancier (and more) clothes, better (and more) meat, and all manner of trinkets and gadgets and containers and devices and equipment to make life more fun. They will object: Does not the Old Testament promise that God will prosper his people? Indeed! God increases our yield, so that by giving we can prove our yield is not our god. God does not prosper a man's business so that he can move from a Ford to a Cadillac. God prospers a business so that 17,000 unreached people can be reached with the gospel. He prospers the business so that 12 percent of the world's population can move a step back from the precipice of starvation.” - John Piper

89. “I was naked and he had more possessions than he could use all at once. I was the proletarian, he was the capitalist, and my relations to him were reduced to the basic proposition of all revolutions: die, I want what you have. It was the first time in my life I'd taken an interest in politics.” - MacDonald Harris

90. “He is my vulnerability” - Karen Marie Moning

91. “The best luck always happens to people who don't need it.” - Robert Penn Warren

92. “The life of less, one bent on simplicity, and not needing or wanting anything other than what God has deemed good for you turns out to be all you could ever need or want.” - Hayley and Michael DiMarco

93. “If you have the woman you love, what more do you need? Well, besides an alibi for the time of her husband’s murder.
” - Dark Jar Tin Zoo

94. “Pregnancy had seemed a reasonable excuse for letting her metal-smithing tools languish, but that accounted for only eighteen months of the last twenty-six years. Motherhood wasn't the real problem, though it took him a long time to figure out what was. She needed resistance, the very quality that metal most demonstrably offered up. Suddenly Glynis had no difficulty to overcome, no hard artisan's life with galleries filching half the too-small price of a mokume brooch that had taken three weeks to forge. No, her husband made a good living, and if she slept late and dawdled the afternoon away reading Lustre, American Craft Magazine and Lapidary Journal, the phone bill would still get paid. For that matter, she needed need itself. She could overcome her anguish about embarking on an object that, once completed, might not meet her exacting standards only if she had no choice. In this sense, his helping had hurt her. By providing the financial cushion that should have facilitated making all the metal whathaveyou she liked, he had ruined her life. Wrapped in a slackening bow, ease was a poisonous present.” - Lionel Shriver

95. “But the walls of my resolvemortared with stubbornnesshave been breached by circumstancesI cannot handle alone.” - Susie Clevenger

96. “How often ... do we pass by a need, a life that could be changed with the smallest bit of effort? And it's not that we don't care but that we're driving so fast, all we see are the fence posts flashing by on the side of the highway?Maybe the first step in changing the world is in slowing down and looking through the fences.” - Lisa Wingate

97. “Somehow, we'll find it. The balance between whom we wish to be and whom we need to be. But for now, we simply have to be satisfied with who we are.” - Brandon Sanderson

98. “Every action is a losing, a letting go, a passing away from oneself of some bit of one’s own reality into the existence of others and of the world. In Jesus Christ, this character of action is not resisted, by trying to use our action to assert ourselves, extend ourselves, to impose our will and being upon situations. In Jesus Christ, this self-expending character of action is joyfully affirmed. I receive myself constantly from God’s Parenting love. But so far as some aspects of myself are at my disposal, these I receive to give away. Those who would live as Jesus did—who would act and purpose themselves as Jesus did—mean to love, i.e., they mean to expend themselves for others unto death. Their being is meant to pass away from them to others, and they make that meaning the conscious direction of their existence. Too often the love which is proclaimed in the churches suppresses this element of loss and need and death in activity. As a Christian, I often speak of love as helping others, but I ignore what this does to the person who loves. I ignore the fact that love is self-expenditure, a real expending and losing and deterioration of the self. I speak of love as if the person loving had no problems, no needs, no limits. In other words, I speak of love as if the affluent dream were true. This kind of proclamation is heard everywhere. We hear it said: 'Since you have no unanswered needs, why don’t you go out and help those other people who are in need?' But we never hear people go on and add: 'If you do this, you too will be driven into need.' And by not stating this conclusion, people give the childish impression that Christian love is some kind of cornucopia, where we can reach to everybody’s needs and problems and still have everything we need for ourselves. Believe me, there are grown-up persons who speak this kind of nonsense. And when people try to live out this illusory love, they become terrified when the self-expending begins to take its toll. Terror of relationship is [that] we eat each other. But note this very carefully: like Jesus, we too can only live to give our received selves away freely because we know our being is not thereby ended, but still and always lies in the Parenting of our God....Those who love in the name of Jesus Christ... serve the needs of others willingly, even to the point of being exposed in their own neediness.... They do not cope with their own needs. They do not anguish over how their own needs may be met by the twists and turns of their circumstances, by the whims of their society, or by the strategies of their own egos. At the center of their life—the very innermost center—they are grateful to God, because... they do not fear neediness. That is what frees them to serve the needy, to companion the needy, to become and be one of the needy.” - Arthur C. McGill

99. “Whiskey, glass, pour, toss back, glare. Repeat. “Cop out,” I slurred in retaliation, pointing the empty glass at Peter.“Don’t get drunk. Fuck. I need you sober,” he yelled, snatching the glass out of my hand.“There’s the problem right there. You need me sober. You need my help. You need something from me.” I laughed, tossing the bottle on the sofa, ignoring the glug glug glug as it emptied over my cushions. “And I just need you.”“Need me to what?” He asked with a huff, tipping the bottle right-side up.“Nothing. I just need you,” I whispered and flopped into a nearby recliner.” - Dani Alexander

100. “Infantile love follows the principle: "I love because I am loved." Mature love follows the principle: "I am loved because I love." Immature love says: "I love you because I need you." Mature love says: "I need you because I love you.” - Erich Fromm

101. “Inner strength of character cannot be measured by any means but performance in the time of need.” - K.L. Toth

102. “Half naked, he drank her in with his eyes, imprinting this moment into his mind. This, he would take to his death – the woman that stirred him to life.” - Dianna Hardy

103. “He could have watched her all night. He could watch her for an eternity and still never be able to capture the essence of what it is that makes ‘love’.” - Dianna Hardy

104. “She waited for him with shallow breaths, head thrown back, eyes half closed, completely exposed in her trust of him, and it unravelled the last thread holding him together.” - Dianna Hardy

105. “A Wish on the Sun""I see the world beyond a tiny window that allows a glimpse of Heaven into my life. Those who dwell in that enviable light cannot hear me through the glass that muffles my cries. They do not appear to see my face pressed against this barrier.I watch them live, carefree and smiling. Even when our eyes lock—mine wide and weary—theirs squint beyond notice of me. They can't peer past the glass, the sunlight glaring off its surface. They don't see me. They won't see me.I make a wish on the sun, staring into its fiery brightness, imagining it blinding me to the beauty beyond my reach. Would my hell feel so awful then? The sun, this nearest star, absorbs my deepest wish for the thousandth time. 'Save me! Hold my hand! Pretend to care!'The light is blocked by a figure stepping past my window, and I feel the universe turn its cold shoulder on me. Despair smothers the hope that made my lips move in utterance of a desperate wish. It ebbs and weakens, but it does not die. The flicker of an ember remains, enough to ignite hope again—another time.All storms eventually cease, do they not?Once more, I press my face against the glass to view a glimpse of Heaven lived by the undeserving. I savor the sunlight, the only thing powerful enough to penetrate the window that bars me in hell. The warm rays touch me. I imagine God's fingers caressing my face—and the dying ember of hope suddenly inflames.” - Richelle E. Goodrich