83 Longing Quotes For Inspiration

In the vast landscape of human emotions, few feelings are as universally experienced yet profoundly personal as longing. Whether it's the ache of unfulfilled dreams, the nostalgic pull of past memories, or the deep yearning for a brighter future, longing shapes our inner worlds in powerful ways. For those moments when you're searching for words to capture this intricate emotion, we've curated a collection of 83 inspiring quotes. These carefully selected quotes are designed to resonate with the myriad ways in which we experience and express longing, offering both solace and inspiration on your journey. Dive in, and let these words illuminate the depths of your heart.

1. “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

2. “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

3. “Absence is to love what wind is to fire; it extinguishes the small, it inflames the great.” - Roger de Bussy-Rabutin

4. “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

5. “Like you're riding a train at night across some vast plain, and youcatch a glimpse of a tiny light in a window of a farmhouse. In aninstant it's sucked back into the darkness behind and vanishes. Butif you close your eyes, that point of light stays with you, justbarely for a few moments.” - Haruki Murakami

6. “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

7. “I want morning and noon and nightfall with you. I want your tears, your smiles, your kisses...the smell of your hair, the taste of your skin, the touch of your breath on my face. I want to see you in the final hour of my life...to lie in your arms as I take my last breath.” - Lisa Kleypas

8. “See how she leans her cheek upon her hand. O, that I were a glove upon that hand That I might touch that cheek!” - William Shakespeare

9. “But I said that you could still want something that is very unlikely to happen.” - Mark Haddon

10. “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

11. “You see how it is godlike to love the being of someone. Your existence is a delight to us. I hope you never have to long for a child as I did, but oh, what a splendid thing it has been that you came finally, and what a blessing to enjoy you now for almost seven years.” - Marilynne Robinson

12. “I love the stillness of the wood; I love the music of the rill:I love the couch in pensive moodUpon some silent hill. Scarce heard, beneath yon arching trees, The silver-crested ripples pass; and, like a mimic brook, the breezeWhispers among the grass. Here from the world I win release, Nor scorn of men, nor footstep rude, Break into mar the holy peace Of this great solitude. Here may the silent tears I weepLull the vested spirit into rest, As infants sob themselves to sleep Upon a mothers breast. But when the bitter hour is gone,And the keen throbbing pangs are still, Oh, sweetest then to couch aloneUpon some silent hill!To live in joys that once have been, To put the cold world out of sight,And deck life's drear and barren sceneWith hues of rainbow-light. For what to man the gift of breath, If sorrow be his lot below; If all the day that ends in deathBe dark with clouds of woe?Shall the poor transport of an hourRepay long years of sore distress—The fragrance of a lonely flower Make glad the wilderness? Ye golden house of life's young spring, Of innocence, of love and truth!Bright, beyond all imagining, Thou fairy-dream of youth!I'd give all wealth that years have piled, The slow result of Life's decay, To be once more a little childFor one bright summer's day.” - Lewis Carroll

13. “...I couldn't let go of the thought that it had, in fact, been he, restless and moody Heathcliff. Day after day, he floated through all the Wal-Marts in America, searching for me in a million lonely aisles.” - Marisha Pessl

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

15. “…There is the heat of Love, the pulsing rush of Longing, the lover’s whisper, irresistible—magic to make the sanest man go mad.” - Homer

16. “Mika: Were you happy?Hiro: I was so happy.” - Ibuki Haneda (伊吹羽田)

17. “Stop longing. You poison today’s ease, reaching always for tomorrow.” - Robin Hobb

18. “Let not our longing slay the appetite of our living.” - Jim Elliot

19. “Till then I wasn't alive, I longed for you like the love sick moon pulls the tide” - Corinne Bailey Rae

20. “I love you, he thought, looking at Win. I love every part of you, every thought and word... the entire complex, fascinating bundle of all the things you are. I want you with ten different kinds of need at once. I love all the seasons of you, the way you are now, the thought of how much more beautiful you'll be in the decades to come. I love you for being the answer to every question my heart could ask.And it seemed so easy, once he capitulated. It seemed natural and right.Kev wasn't certain if he was surrendering to Win or to his own passion for her. Only that there was no more holding back. He would take her. And he would give her everything he had, every part of his soul, even the broken pieces.” - Lisa Kleypas

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

22. “...and I suddenly feel that Henry is there, incredible need for Henry to be there and to put his hand on me even while it seems to me that Henry is the rain and I am alone and wanting him- Clare” - Audrey Niffenegger

23. “Don't let's ask for the moon! We have the stars!” - Olive Higgins Prouty

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

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

26. “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

27. “Wild Nights—Wild Nights!Were I with theeWild Nights should beOur luxury!Futile—the winds—To a heart in port—Done with the compass—Done with the chart!Rowing in Eden—Ah, the sea!Might I but moor— Tonight—In thee!” - Emily Dickinson

28. “For millions of years flowers have been producing thorns. For millions of years sheep have been eating them all the same. And it's not serious, trying to understand why flowers go to such trouble to produce thorns that are good for nothing? It's not important, the war between the sheep and the flowers? It's no more serious and more important than the numbers that fat red gentleman is adding up? Suppose I happen to know a unique flower, one that exists nowhere in the world except on my planet, one that a little sheep can wipe out in a single bite one morning, just like that, without even realizing what he'd doing - that isn't important? If someone loves a flower of which just one example exists among all the millions and millions of stars, that's enough to make him happy when he looks at the stars. He tells himself 'My flower's up there somewhere...' But if the sheep eats the flower, then for him it's as if, suddenly, all the stars went out. And that isn't important?” - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

29. “terucap rindu sepasang insan..geliat sang cinta di lubuk hati..terurai kata nan indah menawan..gundah pun sirna dibuai si mimpi.” - Toba Beta

30. “Desiring another person is perhaps the most risky endeavor of all. As soon as you want somebody—really want him—it is as though you have taken a surgical needle and sutured your happiness to the skin of that person, so that any separation will now cause a lacerating injury.” - Elizabeth Gilbert

31. “Give me the waters of Lethe that numb the heart, if they exist, I will still not have the power to forget you.” - Publius Ovidius Naso

32. “While a common reaction to seeing a thing of beauty is to want to buy it, our real desire may be not so much to own what we find beautiful as to lay permanent claim to the inner qualities it embodies.Owning such an object may help us realise our ambition of absorbing the virtues to which it alludes, but we ought not to presume that those virtues will automatically or effortlessly begin to rub off on us through tenure. Endeavouring to purchase something we think beautiful may in fact be the most unimaginative way of dealing with the longing it excites in us, just as trying to sleep with someone may be the bluntest response to a feeling of love.What we seek, at the deepest level, is inwardly to resemble, rather than physically possess, the objects and places that touch us through their beauty.” - Alain De Botton

33. “The feelings that hurt most, the emotions that sting most, are those that are absurd - The longing for impossible things, precisely because they are impossible; nostalgia for what never was; the desire for what could have been; regret over not being someone else; dissatisfaction with the world’s existence. All these half-tones of the soul’s consciousness create in us a painful landscape, an eternal sunset of what we are.” - Fernando Pessoa

34. “Plain Kate greased her boots and bandaged her feet, and soon she would walk like a Roamer born. She helped Drina with the water and the wood, and in the long, wet evenings she carved objarka burji.Plain Kate carved fast and learned slowly. She was bewildered most of the time, but Daj called her mira again, and when she asked Drina what it meant, the girl replied, "It means she likes you. It means your family."Family. It could have kept her walking for a hundred miles. And she did walk far.” - Erin Bow

35. “Taggle, meanwhile, made himself popular, killing rats and bringing a rabbit into camp every evening, preening in the praise - silently, thank god, though at night, he recounted choice bits to Kate: "Rye Baro says I am a princeling; he split the leg bone for me so that I could eat the marrow. They love me. And I'm sure they'll keep you, too."Mira, she thought, and treasured it each time she heard it, They must keep me. Family.” - Erin Bow

36. “But why, she thought wryly, did a man seem more attractive as he became less available? How humbling to think one had so much in common with a cow stretching its neck through a gate for better grass.” - Mary Jo Putney

37. “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

38. “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

39. “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

40. “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

41. “Erotic longing is really a longing to merge with something greater than oneself. For every kind of love is a force that holds the promise of taking us beyond the limitations of our individual lives.” - Julianne Davidow

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

43. “The restlessness and the longing, like the longing that is in the whistle of a faraway train. Except that the longing isn't really in the whistle—it is in you.” - Meindert DeJong

44. “Until the longing came again, like the longing that you hear in the whistle of a train that is going far away. But the longing isn't really in the whistle, the longing is in you—for the wonder and the loveliness that is in the world, and everywhere.” - Meindert DeJong

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

46. “It suddenly struck me that Dawsey is a lonesome person. I think it may be that he has always been lonely, but he didn't mind before, and now he minds.” - Annie Barrows

47. “I watched the spinning stars, grateful, sad and proud, as only a man who has outlived his destiny and realizes he might yet forge himself another, can be.” - Roger Zelazny

48. “If the portraits of our absent friends are pleasant to us, which renew our memory of them and relieve our regret for their absence by a false and empty consolation, how much more pleasant are letters which bring us the written characters of the absent friend.” - Héloïse d'Argenteuil

49. “I think I fell in love with you that amazing night on the kitchen floor. Or maybe it was the evening you stepped up and set my arm." Testing things, he reached for her hand, and, to his joy, she glared, but she let him take it. "Or maybe the night I knew I loved you was when I kissed you under the mistletoe on Christmas Eve. It's hard to say because I look at you now and it seems to me there's never been a time when I didn't love you.” - Maggie Osborne

50. “My letters! all dead paper, mute and white!And yet they seem alive and quiveringAgainst my tremulous hands which loose the stringAnd let them drop down on my knee to-night.This said, -- he wished to have me in his sightOnce, as a friend: this fixed a day in springTo come and touch my hand ... a simple thing,Yet I wept for it! -- this, ... the paper's light ...Said, Dear I love thee; and I sank and quailedAs if God's future thundered on my past.This said, I am thine -- and so its ink has paledWith lying at my heart that beat too fast.And this ... O Love, thy words have ill availedIf, what this said, I dared repeat at last!” - Elizabeth Barrett Browning

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

52. “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

53. “A pine tree standeth lonelyIn the North on an upland bare;It standeth whitely shroudedWith snow, and sleepeth there.It dreameth of a Palm treeWhich far in the East alone,In the mournful silence standethOn its ridge of burning stone.” - Heinrich Heine

54. “The days passed in a dream. I pictured our reunion again and again, played it out in my mind over and over until I’d almost worn a groove in my thoughts, so deep that it seemed the only thing I could think of was our reunion. Anticipation is a gift. Perhaps there is none greater. Anticipation is born of hope. Indeed it is hope’s finest expression. In hope’s loss, however, is the greatest despair.” - Steven L. Peck

55. “Kavita’s arms are still outstretched, but they hold nothing. After the metal gate clangs shut behind them, Kavita can still hear Usha’s piercing wail echoing inside.” - shilpi somaya gowda

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

57. “I've always tried to make a home for myself, but I have not felt at home in myself. I've worked hard at being the hero of my own life. But every time I checked the register of displaced persons, I was still on it. I didn't know how to belong. Longing? Yes. Belonging? No.” - Jeanette Winterson

58. “Do you know what the mathematical expression is for longing? ... The negative numbers. The formalization of the feeling that you are missing something.” - Peter Høeg

59. “Oh, I wish I lived in a caravan!’ said Jimmy longingly. ‘How lovely it must be to live in a house that has wheels and can go away down the lanes and through the towns, and stand still in fields at night!” - Enid Blyton

60. “My library is an archive of longings.” - Susan Sontag

61. “Desire is an appetite, quickly sated. Longing is a wound, an opening in the heart or the spirit. Whatever the cause, whatever the duration, it almost always leaves a scar.” - Philip Sington

62. “‎"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

63. “I miss you.I miss you. I miss you, I miss you.Be ready, because when I see you, I'll never let you go again.” - Veronica Rossi

64. “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

65. “I really should be studying now, but you're much more important to me than a .50 calibre machine gun.” - Kara Martinelli

66. “The loneliest days are the ones where you keep company with someone you love who can’t hear you.” - Holly Robinson

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

68. “We are beautiful because we are sons and daughters of God, not because we look a certain way.” - Kate Wicker

69. “The beauty of a fragment is that it still supports the hope of brilliant completeness.” - Tobias Wolff

70. “The ocean exerts an inexorable pull over sea people wherever they are-in a bright-lit, inland city or the dead center of a desert-and when they feel the tug there is no choice but somehow to reach it and stand at its immense, earth-dissolving edge, straightaway calmed.” - Anuradha Roy

71. “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

72. “You think embracing the longing while waiting for the right man is impossible? Well obviously you didn't get the memo.” - Osayi Osar-Emokpae

73. “Hope is such a tenuous quality. To feel it and then to be denied what one most longs for ... Better, surely, not to hope at all, than to open the heart to a hope that is impossible.” - Juliet Marillier

74. “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

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

76. “I call him my friend, but in the last year it's seemed too casual a word for what Gale is to me. A pang of longing shoots through my chest. If only he was with me now! But of course, I don't want that. I don't want him in the arena where he'd be dead in a few days. I just... I just miss him. And I hate being so alone. Does he miss me? He must.” - Suzanne Collins

77. “He was what the egotistical part of me had always longed for: danger, sexiness, popularity, style, unpredictability. The kind of man who'd always keep me guessing. Just one night with him and i'd already started to wonder if perhaps i'd spent the last two years in a comfortable coma.” - Lucy Robinson

78. “Men dream more about coming home than about leaving.” - Paulo Coelho

79. “Only now, in rhythmic waves, was she struck by her stupidity, her blindness, her estheronautiness, and, above all, her longing, the insult of the power of her longing, and she knew very well that is was these shortcomings that had made her so eager to interweave in his story the threads of her secret dreams of candor and of painful, purifying honesty; of a generous togetherness in which everything was possible. For a moment, with all that had been spun and stabbed and defiled within her, her face took on the expression of a frightened, abandoned girl who lunges out to bite, who lives unimaginably close to the skin’s surface, ready to be drawn out like a final plan of retreat.” - David Grossman

80. “And how do you really feel?Like I'll never recover. Like I'll never draw another breath without half of it being a wish for him.” - Jane Seville

81. “She had been his talisman, his cure for the insecurities and worries that he knew deep down didn't really matter, but somehow had always managed to get the best of him.” - Erik Tomblin

82. “We should have stories in common, I found myself thinking. We should have stories, and jokes no one understands, and memories that we know will stay alive because neither of us will let the other forget.” - Kamila Shamsie

83. “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