In my youth and comparative inexperience I had always regarded the yearning and pangs of love as the worst torture that could afflict the human heart. At this moment, however, I began to realize that there was another and perhaps grimmer torture than that of longing and desiring: that of being loved against one's will and of being unable to defend oneself against the urgency of another's passion; of seeing another human being seared by the flame of her desire and of having to look impotently, lacking the power, the capacity, the strength to pluck her from the flames.
There are three ingredients in the good life: learning, earning and yearning.
When one is building a ship, one does not begin with gathering timber and cutting planks, but rather by arousing in people the yearning for the great wide sea.
Our yearning for truth actually comes from truth.
I love short stories because I believe they are the way we live. They are what our friends tell us, in their pain and joy, their passion and rage, their yearning and their cry against injustice.
People are yearning to be asked to use the full measure of their potential for something they care about.
The yearning for an afterlife is the opposite of selfish: it is love and praise for the world that we are privileged, in this complex interval of light, to witness and experience.
Vague a l'ame — melancholy yearning for the end of the world.
The dual substance of Christ- the yearning, so human, so superhuman, of man to attain God. . . has always been a deep inscrutable mystery to me. My principle anguish and source of all my joys and sorrows from my youth onward has been the incessant, merciless battle between the spirit and the flesh. . . and my soul is the arena where these two armies have clashed and met.
We are all filled with a longing for the wild. There are few culturally sanctioned antidotes for this yearning. We were taught to feel shame for such a desire. We grew our hair long and used it to hide our feelings. But the shadow of Wild Woman still lurks behind us during our days and in our nights. No matter where we are, the shadow that trots behind us is definitely four-footed.
The trees come up to my window like the yearning voice of the dumb earth
One writes because one has been touched by the yearning for and the despair of ever touching the Other.
We are like lutes once held by God. Being away from his warm body fully explains this constant yearning.
There is in my nature, methinks, a singular yearning toward all wildness.
And they did have fun, though it was of different kind now. All that yearning and passion had been replaced by a steady pulse of pleasure and satisfaction and occasional irritation, and this seemed to be a happy exchange; if there had been moments in her life when she had been more elated, there had never been a time when things had been more constant.
Why don't we follow our yearning?
I started writing because there's an absence of things I was familiar with or that I dreamed about. One of my senses of anger is related to this vacancy - a yearning I had as a teenager. . . and when I get ready to write, I think I'm trying to fill that. . .
I was a dweller amid shadows grim: Till FREEDOM touched my yearning eyes, and lo! Life in a shining circle, rounding rose, As heaven on heaven goes up the jewell'd night. New floods of passionate life swirl'd at my heart, Like Ocean-surges rolling round the world: And FREEDOM was my glittering Bride.
Creativity springs from the yearning to be the fullness of who you are.
There is most certainly a purpose you are yearning to fulfill. Find it, know it, follow it, and you can change the world.