In life, moments of challenge and uncertainty often remind us of what truly matters. Inspirational quotes about need can offer comfort, motivation, and a fresh perspective when we face obstacles or seek purpose. In this collection, you’ll find 47 carefully selected quotes that resonate with the human experience of desire, necessity, and growth—encouraging you to embrace your journey with strength and hope.
1. “You can't always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, you might find, you get what you need.” - Mick Jagger
2. “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
3. “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
4. “Not even need and love can defeat fate...” - Ursula K. Le Guin
5. “In a strong relationship, you should love your companion more than you need them.” - Steve Maraboli
6. “We need houses as we need clothes, architecture stimulates fashion. It’s like hunger and thirst — you need them both.” - Karl Lagerfeld
7. “But if one had everything one could ever need or want, what was left to dream of?” - Mary Balogh
8. “You're good salesman, if you make people buyproduct they don't need.” - Toba Beta
9. “I'm oxygen and he's dying to breathe.” - Tahereh Mafi
10. “Dreams and needs tear down fortress of impossibility.” - Toba Beta
11. “Chris: I don't know why it is, but every time I reach out for something I want, I have to pull back because other people will suffer.” - Arthur Miller
12. “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
13. “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
14. “I don't wanna need you because I can't have you.” - Clint Eastwood
15. “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
16. “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
17. “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
18. “The world is perishing for lack of the knowledge of God and the Church is famishing for want of His Presence.” - A.W. Tozer
19. “You aren't alive if you aren't in need.” - Henry Cloud
20. “The bittersweet about truth is that nothing could be more hurtful, yet nothing could be more helpful.” - Mike Norton
21. “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
22. “Well, if you can't have what you want, you could try to want what you have.” - Gillian Shields
23. “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
24. “Technology doesn’t change people’s basic needs or their natures.” - Priya Ardis
25. “[...] De toute façon, les hommes sont trop plates!' 'Tu les aimes, pourtant.' 'J'en ai besoin! C'est pas pareil!” - Michel Tremblay
26. “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
27. “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
28. “Don't stay away from me anymore."I stop myself, just barely, from telling him I won't. I can't promise that. Can't lie. He opens his eyes. Stares starkly, bleakly. "I need you.” - Sophie Jordan
29. “I am both numb and oversensitive, overwhelmed by the need, the raw and desperate need of the girls I am listening to and trying to help. I'm overdosing on the trauma of others, while still barely healing from my own.I cry for hour at home and have fitful nights of little sleep. My nightmares resurface as my own pain is repeated to me, magnified a thousand times. It feels insurmountable. How can you save everyone? How can you rescue them? How do you get over your pain? How do you ever feel normal?” - Rachel Lloyd
30. “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
31. “Christians are God's delivery people, through whom he does his giving to a needy world. We are conduits of God's grace to others. Our eternal investment portfolio should be full of the most strategic kingdom-building projects to which we can disburse God's funds.” - Randy Alcorn
32. “The art of our necessities is strangeThat can make vile things precious.” - William Shakespeare
33. “When you feel deep change in your heart, you must understand that there is a lack of an old and righteous company.” - Moazzam Shaikh
34. “Maybe it ain't about others' mistakes,but only your need for someone to blame.” - Toba Beta
35. “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
36. “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
37. “God's people are not to accumulate stuff for tomorrow but to share indiscriminately with the scandalous and holy confidence that God will provide for tomorrow. Then we need not stockpile stuff in barns or a 401(k), especially when there is someone in need.” - Shane Claiborne
38. “The world is already yours - why try to conquer it?” - Rasheed Ogunlaru
39. “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
40. “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
41. “This is what Jesus had in mind: folks coming together, forming close-knit communities and meeting each other's needs-- no kings, no major welfare systems, no presidents necessary. His is a theology and practice for the people of God, not a set of suggestions for empire.” - Shane Claiborne
42. “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
43. “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
44. “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
45. “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
46. “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
47. “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
