Quotes about Longing

Dependence, sorrow, repentance, a longing to change—these are the gates to God's kingdom.

The temptation that Jesus resisted in the wildreness [a crown without a cross; worldly glory], many of us, His followers, still long for.

The deepest longings we feel on earth, as parents, as lovers, are mere flickers of the hungering desire God feels for us. It is a desire that cost him the Incarnation and the Crucifixion.

Augustine's Confessions...What it is, therefore, he begins, that goes on within the soul, since it takes greater delight if things that it loves are found or restored to it than if it had always possessed them?

Although we all have the capacity, our spiritual longing will remain unfulfilled until we make contact, and then develop the skills of spiritual "correspondence.

O Jerusalem, Jerusalem [...] how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were not willing." The disciples had proposed that Jesus call down fire on unrepentant cities; in contrast, Jesus uttered a cry of helplessness, an astonishing "if only" from the lips of the Son of God. He would not force himself on those who were not willing.

Faith is not the clinging to a shrine but an endless pilgrimage of the heart. Audacious longing, burning songs, daring thoughts, an impulse overwhelming the heart, usurping the mind—these are all a drive toward [loving the One] who rings our heart like a bell. —ABRAHAM HESCHEL

I need God more than anything I might get from God.

There is almost a sensual longing for communion with others who have a large vision.

Dost thou love picking meat? Or wouldst thou see A man in the clouds, and have him speak to thee?

But though this be so, yet since things present and our fleshly appetite are such near neighbours one to another; and again, because things to come, and carnal sense, are such strangers one to another; therefore it is, that the first of these so suddenly fall into amity, and that distance is so continued between the second.

If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.