Jan. 21, 2025, 9:45 a.m.
In the rapidly shifting landscape of modern life, a well-timed quote can offer clarity, inspiration, and motivation right when we need it most. Whether you're seeking solace, encouragement, or a spark of creativity, words have an unparalleled power to transform our perspectives and fuel our journeys. In this collection, we've curated the top 51 quotes you need now, each chosen for its ability to resonate deeply and inspire action. Allow these words to be your guiding light, offering insights and wisdom for every twist and turn life presents. Dive in and discover the perfect quote to elevate your day and ignite your passion.
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. “To crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow. For when does a berry break upon the tongue as sweetly as when one longs to taste it, and when is the taste refracted into so many hues and savors of ripeness and earth, and when do our senses know any thing so utterly as when we lack it? And here again is a foreshadowing -- the world will be made whole. For to wish for a hand on one's hair is all but to feel it. So whatever we may lose, very craving gives it back to us again.” - Marilynne Robinson
4. “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
5. “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
6. “Having someone wonder where you are when you don't come home at night is a very old human need. ” - Margaret Mead
7. “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
8. “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
9. “Doubter wants proof which contributes nothing to her faith.” - Toba Beta
10. “Dreams and needs tear down fortress of impossibility.” - Toba Beta
11. “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
12. “I don't wanna need you because I can't have you.” - Clint Eastwood
13. “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
14. “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
15. “A need for revenge can burn long and hot. Especially if every glance in a mirror reinforces it.” - Suzanne Collins
16. “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
17. “The world is perishing for lack of the knowledge of God and the Church is famishing for want of His Presence.” - A.W. Tozer
18. “We wanted a family so bad, all of us. And we just grabbed each another and made us one. Simple as that.” - Cynthia Rylant
19. “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
20. “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
21. “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
22. “Technology doesn’t change people’s basic needs or their natures.” - Priya Ardis
23. “[...] De toute façon, les hommes sont trop plates!' 'Tu les aimes, pourtant.' 'J'en ai besoin! C'est pas pareil!” - Michel Tremblay
24. “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
25. “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
26. “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
27. “The art of our necessities is strangeThat can make vile things precious.” - William Shakespeare
28. “I need you.” He could not go any further down. Rock bottom. And at the very bottom was just this one thing. The core of it all. “Fucking... love you... too much.” - Aleksandr Voinov
29. “The need in me beautiful is to look back on you forever!!” - Abhijeet Sawant
30. “Maybe it ain't about others' mistakes,but only your need for someone to blame.” - Toba Beta
31. “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
32. “It was OK to need people; she was learning that. You just had to be careful.” - Nicole Richie
33. “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
34. “Essential to life, is desiring the things that you need, than needing the things you desire.” - Anthony Liccione
35. “Women need a reason to have sex, while men just need an angle” - Josh Stern
36. “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
37. “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
38. “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
39. “The world is already yours - why try to conquer it?” - Rasheed Ogunlaru
40. “...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
41. “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
42. “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
43. “The best luck always happens to people who don't need it.” - Robert Penn Warren
44. “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
45. “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
46. “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
47. “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
48. “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
49. “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
50. “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
51. “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