54 Longing Quotes To Inspire

Longing, an emotion that touches the soul, often drives us towards our deepest desires and dreams. It’s a feeling that can spark creativity, motivate us to achieve our goals, and even bring about profound personal growth. In this post, we’ve gathered 54 of the most inspiring quotes about longing. Each quote captures the essence of yearning, offering wisdom and insight that can illuminate our own journeys. Whether you are seeking motivation, a sense of connection, or simply some beautiful words to ponder, these quotes are sure to resonate. Dive in and let the power of longing guide you towards the extraordinary.

1. “You are ice and fire The touch of you burns my hands like snow” - Amy Lowell

2. “For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers. I revere them when they live in tribes and families, in forests and groves. And even more I revere them when they stand alone. They are like lonely persons. Not like hermits who have stolen away out of some weakness, but like great, solitary men, like Beethoven and Nietzsche. In their highest boughs the world rustles, their roots rest in infinity; but they do not lose themselves there, they struggle with all the force of their lives for one thing only: to fulfil themselves according to their own laws, to build up their own form, to represent themselves. Nothing is holier, nothing is more exemplary than a beautiful, strong tree. When a tree is cut down and reveals its naked death-wound to the sun, one can read its whole history in the luminous, inscribed disk of its trunk: in the rings of its years, its scars, all the struggle, all the suffering, all the sickness, all the happiness and prosperity stand truly written, the narrow years and the luxurious years, the attacks withstood, the storms endured. And every young farmboy knows that the hardest and noblest wood has the narrowest rings, that high on the mountains and in continuing danger the most indestructible, the strongest, the ideal trees grow. Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth. They do not preach learning and precepts, they preach, undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life. A tree says: A kernel is hidden in me, a spark, a thought, I am life from eternal life. The attempt and the risk that the eternal mother took with me is unique, unique the form and veins of my skin, unique the smallest play of leaves in my branches and the smallest scar on my bark. I was made to form and reveal the eternal in my smallest special detail. A tree says: My strength is trust. I know nothing about my fathers, I know nothing about the thousand children that every year spring out of me. I live out the secret of my seed to the very end, and I care for nothing else. I trust that God is in me. I trust that my labor is holy. Out of this trust I live. When we are stricken and cannot bear our lives any longer, then a tree has something to say to us: Be still! Be still! Look at me! Life is not easy, life is not difficult. Those are childish thoughts. Let God speak within you, and your thoughts will grow silent. You are anxious because your path leads away from mother and home. But every step and every day lead you back again to the mother. Home is neither here nor there. Home is within you, or home is nowhere at all. A longing to wander tears my heart when I hear trees rustling in the wind at evening. If one listens to them silently for a long time, this longing reveals its kernel, its meaning. It is not so much a matter of escaping from one's suffering, though it may seem to be so. It is a longing for home, for a memory of the mother, for new metaphors for life. It leads home. Every path leads homeward, every step is birth, every step is death, every grave is mother. So the tree rustles in the evening, when we stand uneasy before our own childish thoughts: Trees have long thoughts, long-breathing and restful, just as they have longer lives than ours. They are wiser than we are, as long as we do not listen to them. But when we have learned how to listen to trees, then the brevity and the quickness and the childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve an incomparable joy. Whoever has learned how to listen to trees no longer wants to be a tree. He wants to be nothing except what he is. That is home. That is happiness.” - Herman Hesse

3. “There's a taste in the air, sweet and vaguely antiseptic, that reminds him of his teenage years in these streets, and of a general state of longing, a hunger for life to begin that from this distance seems like happiness.” - Ian McEwan

4. “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 worshipers. 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

5. “If you were mine, I'd never leave you, Prudence. I couldn't.” - Anne Gracie

6. “Dreadful will be the day when the world becomes contented, when one great universal satisfaction spreads itself over the world. Sad will be the day for every man when he becomes absolutely contented with the life that he is living, with the thoughts that he is thinking, with the deeds that he is doing, when there is not forever beating at the doors of his soul some great desire to do something larger which he knows that he was meant and made to do because he is a child of God.” - Phillips Brooks

7. “My life is like an autumn leafI lie around unclaimed.The breeze blows me around,To be trampled under the feet of men.Natures cruel feast has bestowed me with pain,Pain of being a part,Just a part of someone.Pain of departing,Departing from that one.Pick me up like a rose,And hold me to your heart.Keep me there till he does not come.And when he comes do a good deed,Dig the earth below,And bury me deepFor I don't want to lie around,Unclaimed, unloved.” - Dr. Amit Abraham

8. “And, at such a time, for a few of us there will always be a tugging at the heart—knowing a precious moment had gone and we not there. We can ask and ask but we can’t have again what once seemed ours for ever—the way things looked, that church alone in the fields, a bed on belfry floor, a remembered voice, a loved face. They’ve gone and you can only wait for the pain to pass. ” - J.L. Carr

9. “One spirit remained unaware of his presence, staring at Miss Parker with such longing that he reluctantly decided to let it stay. The spirit, a hollow-eyed girl with ringlets and clothing from long past, reached toward Percy, wishing to touch her. Alexi understood. When left to her own devices, Miss Parker was neither shy nor awkward; she was radiant.” - Leanna Renee Hieber

10. “I imagine a line, a white line, painted on the sand and on the ocean, from me to you.” - Jonathan Safran Foer

11. “There is a space between man's imagination and man's attainment that may only be traversed by his longing.” - Khalil Gibran

12. “There I was, cold, isolated and desperate for something I knew I couldn't have. A solution. A remedy. Anything. ...I hated it. Alone and confused was the last place I wanted to be. Somehow I knew I deserved this.” - Brian Krans

13. “There's nothing good about goodnight when it means goodbye.” - Jeff Thomas

14. “Never let the meaning of your love light escape to the dark nothingness of oblivion.” - Sorin Cerin

15. “If you don't receive love from the ones who are meant to love you, you will never stop looking for it.” - Robert Goolrick

16. “Now Doon seemed to care for his new friends more than he did for her. Every time she thought about him she felt a thud of pain, like a bruised place inside her.” - Jeanne DuPrau

17. “Did you miss me while you were looking for yourself out there..” - Train

18. “Without turning on the light, I went to my bed and lay down, my arm thrown across the mattress, my hand aching because Grace wasn't underneath it” - Maggie Stiefvater

19. “The longing for sweets is really a yearning for love or "sweetness.” - Marion Woodman

20. “I don’t know what they are called, the spaces between seconds– but I think of you always in those intervals.” - Salvador Plascencia

21. “He was in my hair, my eyes, my fingers, my heart. I day-dreamed about what he was doing, thinking, seeing, smelling, feeling. I could not eat for thoughts of him.” - Lisa See

22. “I kept it to remind me that although there is evil, there is sometimes beauty and light. You, Jillian. You were always my light.” - Karen Marie Moning

23. “There’s nothing like that feeling of waiting for a guy. It’s the loneliest feeling in the world. Holding that cell phone in your hand as you take out the trash, use the bathroom, change the litter box. Fearful that the one second you aren’t looking will be when they call. Pathetic. And something I have done as recently as last week.” - Hilary Winston

24. “But she had dreamed of being his for too long. He had quite ruined her for a marriage of convenience. She wanted everything from him: his mind, his body, his name and, most of all, his heart.” - Sarah MacLean

25. “You can miss a person you've never known.” - Jodi Picoult

26. “We all have an old knot in the heart we wish to untie.” - Michael Ondaatje

27. “The very people you trusted most could become like strangers in their longing...” - Lynne Reid Banks

28. “It was long since I had longed for anything and the effect on me was horrible.” - Samuel Beckett

29. “Would that thy love, beloved, had less trust in me, that it might be more anxious!” - Héloïse

30. “For the first time, she did want more. She did not know what she wanted, knew that it was dangerous and that she should rest content with what she had, but she knew an emptiness deep inside her, which began to ache.” - Iain Pears

31. “If your heart is broken, do you have a phantom heart?” - Damon Suede

32. “Själva längtan är beviset på att det vi längtar efter finns.” - Karen Blixen

33. “Will it be here that we shall find a place which will not elude us, or which if it remains does not exert on us a culpable attraction? Or must we, leaning over the deck and watching the shores glide by, move forever onward?” - Andre Gide

34. “People often miss things that don't exist--miss things that were but are not anymore.” - Sarah McCoy

35. “Sufre mas el que espera siempreque aquel que nunca espero a nadie?Does he who is always waiting suffer more than he who’s never waited for anyone?” - Pablo Neruda

36. “... this longing inside me that never goes away, must be a poem...must be you ...” - John Geddes

37. “I wonder how much of the day I spend just callin' after you.” - Harper Lee

38. “There is some kiss we want with our whole lives, the touch of spirit on the body. Seawaterbegs the pearl to break its shell.and the lily, how passionatelyit needs some wild darling! Atnight, I open the window and askthe moon to come and press itsface against mine. Breathe intome. Close the language door andopen the lovers window. The moonwon’t use the door, only the window.” - Rumi

39. “Hunger of the heart is much stronger than hunger for food.” - Amanda Comer

40. “The great systems that inform the world about the truth and life invariably claim to be absolutely truthful and well-balanced. In reality they are quaking bridges built out of yearning.” - Peter Høeg

41. “‎"It always seemed somehow less real here... a really detailed dream, but sort of washed out, like a thin watercolor. Softer, somehow, even with their electric light and engines and everything. I guess it was because there was hardly any magic.” - Garth Nix

42. “You just know something is amiss, when you look at someone and long for something that is not yours or you cannot have. It's an absence--a loss of a heartbeat.” - Nadège Richards

43. “Perhaps your hunger to belong is always active and intense because you belonged so totally before you came here. This hunger to belong is the echo and reverberation of your invisible heritage. You are from somewhere else, where you were known, embraced and sheltered. This is also the secret root from which all longing grows. Something in you knows, perhaps remembers, that eternal belonging liberates longing into its surest and most potent creativity. This is why your longing is often wiser than your conventional sense of appropriateness, safety and truth... Your longing desires to take you towards the absolute realization of all the possibilities that sleep in the clay of your heart; it knows your eternal potential, and it will not rest until it is awakened.” - John O'Donohue

44. “My beloved has arrived, but rather than greeting him, All I can do is bite the corner of my apron with a blank expression- What an awkward woman am I. My heart has longed for him as hugely and openly as a full moonBut instead I narrow my eyes, and my glance to him Is sharp and narrow as the crescent moon. But then, I'm not the only one who behaves this way. My mother and my mother's mother were as silly and stumbling as I am when they were girls...Still, the love from my heart is overflowing, As bright and crimson as the heated metal in a blacksmith's forge.” - Kim Dong Hwa

45. “We have it in our head that if we fill our stomachs, we’ll fill our hearts.” - Kate Wicker

46. “It isnt for wantof something to say--something to tell you--something you should know--but to detain you--keep you from going--feeling myself hereas long as you are--as long as you are” - Cid Corman

47. “They no longer wanted to entice anyone; all they wanted was to catch a glimpse for as long as possible of the reflected glory in the great eyes of Odysseus” - Franz Kafka

48. “Jack is somewhere in this city, right now. The thought was like passing by a house where someone was grilling in the back yard. You could smell it, but it wasn't yours, and you couldn't just barge into their home and demand a burger, no matter how your mouth watered.” - Jane Seville

49. “I am inhabited by a cry. Nightly it flaps outLooking, with its hooks, for something to love.--from "Elm", written 19 April 1962” - Sylvia Plath

50. “...that breath of relief that there is someone in the world, finally, who understands what hurts you.” - Lysley Tenorio

51. “My heart is sair-I dare na tell,My heart is sair for Somebody.” - Robert Burns

52. “My dear boy, looking like a thing has little to do with being a thing. Be the thing first, and you will grow to resemble it.” - Liam Perrin

53. “They should not clench their fists,it’s my longing that’s drawing me near to them;they should not stand there full of rage,my longing is timidly drawing near to them;they should not be ready to pounce like vicious dogs,as if they wanted to tear my longing to shreds;they should not threaten with broad sleeves,that pains my longing.Why have they suddenly changed?As great and deep is my longing.No matter how difficult, no matter how menacing:I must reach them and I’m already there.” - Robert Walser

54. “I do,” Drew admitted, his eyes devouring my body appreciatively. “But with you…I want so much more, Summer. So much more than you’re willing to give me.” He paused, “Every single touch, every single look you give me, I cherish.” - Kailin Gow