Hunting is a relic of the barbarism that once thirsted for human blood, but is now content with the blood of animals.
The identification with the common lot which is the essential idea of Democracy becomes the source and expression of social ethics. It is as though we thirsted to drink at the great wells of human experience, because we knew that a daintier or less potent draught would not carry us to the end of the journey, going forward as we must in the heat and jostle of the crowd.
I believed that I was approaching the end of my days without having tasted to the full any of the pleasures for which my heart thirsted. . . without having ever tasted that passion which, through lack of an object, was always suppressed. . . . The impossibility of attaining the real persons precipitated me into the land of chimeras; and seeing nothing that existed worthy of my exalted feelings, I fostered them in an ideal world which my creative imagination soon peopled with beings after my own heart.
I have always thirsted for knowledge, I have always been full of questions.
The Lord, before His Incarnation, let mankind experience all the bitterness of sin, all their powerlessness to eradicate it; and when all longed for a Deliverer, then He appeared, the most wise, all-powerful Physician and Helper. When men hungered and thirsted after righteousness, as it grew weaker, then the everlasting righteousness came.
I used to tell my writing students that they must write the books they wished they could come upon - because then the books they hungered and thirsted for would exist.