Quotes about Longing

Blaise Pascal is usually credited with saying that there is "a God-shaped vacuum in the heart of each man." That longing will not be eliminated by the Rapture. In fact, it will be heightened by the terror of living in a world of unrestrained evil.

A little longer, and we shall be in our true country, and our childhood's joys—those Sunday evenings, those outpourings of the heart—will be given back to us for ever!

Let temporal things be in the use, eternal things in the desire.

How safe for the preserving of heavenly grace to fly from human approval, and not to long after the things which seem to win admiration abroad, but to follow with all earnestness those things which bring amendment of life and heavenly fervour!

Beware, therefore, lest thou strive too earnestly after some desire which thou hast conceived, without taking counsel of Me; lest haply it repent thee afterwards, and that displease thee which before pleased, and for which thou didst long as for a great good.

Let temporal things be in the use, eternal things in the desire. Thou canst not be satisfied with any temporal good, for thou wast not created for the enjoyment of these.

Jean Paul Sartre: "I needed God . . . I reached out for religion, I longed for it, it was the remedy. Had it been denied me, I would have invented it myself.

There are some things even God cannot do. He cannot force anyone to freely accept Him. Forced freedom is a contradiction in terms. This is why Jesus said, Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were not willing. (Matthew 23:37) So the only way God could literally destroy all evil is to destroy all freedom.

To want and not to have, sent all up her body a hardness, a hollowness, a strain. And then to want and not to have- to want and want- how that wrung the heart, and wrung it again and again!

Just in case you ever foolishly forget; I'm never not thinking of you.

But I pine in Solitude. Solitude is my undoing.

For they might be parted for hundreds of years, she and Peter; she never wrote a letter and his were dry sticks; but suddenly it would come over her, If he were with me now what would he say? --some days, some sights bringing him back to her calmly, without the old bitterness; which perhaps was the reward of having cared for people; they came back in the middle of St. James's Park on a fine morning--indeed they did.