Prayer is not asking. It is a longing of the soul.
O God, I have tasted Thy goodness, and it has both satisfied me and made me thirsty for more. I am painfully conscious of my need for further grace. I am ashamed of my lack of desire. O God, the Triune God, I want to want Thee; I long to be filled with longing; I thirst to be made more thirsty still. Show me Thy glory, I pray Thee, so that I may know Thee indeed. Begin in mercy a new work of love within me. Say to my soul, ‘Rise up my love, my fair one, and come away. ’ Then give me grace to rise and follow Thee up from this misty lowland where I have wandered so long.
It is a political thriller. It's very action packed and it's very exciting, but at the same time it's a very big soulful love story about longing and loss. They're not separate, they're completely dependent on one another.
Well, the musicals give emphasis to love, longing, melancholy, sadness. All of that is always there.
I suspected, however, that I wasn't homesick for anything I would find at home when I returned. The longing was for what I wouldn't find: the past and all the people and places there were lost to me.
The novel remains for me one of the few forms where we can record man's complexity and the strength and decency of his longings.
The desert sharpened the sweet ache of his longing, amplified it, gave shape to it in sere geology and clean slant of light.
Gluttony should be destroyed by self-control; unchastity by desire for God and longing for the blessings held in store; avarice by compassion for the poor; anger by goodwill and love for all men; worldly dejection by spiritual joy; listlessness by patience, perseverance and offering thanks to God; self-esteem by doing good in secret and by praying constantly with a contrite heart; and pride by not judging or despising anyone in the manner of the boastful Pharisee (cf. Lk. 18:11-12), and by considering oneself the least of all men.
I have been tortured with longing to believe. . . and the yearning grows stronger the more cogent the intellectual difficulties stand in the way.
It’s Fitzgerald’s thin-but-durable urge to affirm that finally makes Gatsby worthy of being our Great American Novel. Its soaring conclusion tells us that, even though Gatsby dies and the small and corrupt survive, his longing was nonetheless magnificent.
But what are wishes, compared with longings?
I think there is a longing in everyone for a personal relationship with God.
It got to a point of where it was ruining my health and I just hated it. I hated doing it and I couldn't stop without some kind of help to get the longing for it out of my system.
Of course there must be the urge, the indefinable longing to get something through into terms of plastic presentation, but results are nearly always unpredictable.
This week, the world gathers in Beijing for the 2008 Olympic games. This is the extraordinary moment China has been dreaming of for 100 years. People have been longing for this moment, because it symbolises a turning point in China's relationship with the outside world.
The deepest longing of the human heart is to know and enjoy the glory of God. We were made for this.
The act of longing for something will always be more intense than the requiting of it.
We are all the same. . . all the same. . . longing to find our way back. . . back to the One. . . back to the Only One!
So it persists, for many of us, hunger channeled into some internal circuitry of longing, routed this way and that, emerging in a thousand different forms. The diet form, the romance form, the addiction form, the overriding hunger for this purchase or that job, this relationship or that one. Hunger may be insatiable by nature, it may be fathomless, but our will to fill it, our often blind tenacity in the face of it, can be extraordinary.
only an aching heart Conceives a changeless work of art.