A feeling of sadness and longing,
That is not akin to pain,
And resembles sorrow only
As the mist resembles the rain. [ Longfellow ]

Better go away longing than loathing. [ Proverb ]

Think not, dream not that thou livest,
If thy hand doth idly lie,
If thy soul for ever longing,
Yearn but for the by and bye. [ M. W. Wood ]

An Arab, by his earnest gaze,
Has clothed a lovely maid with blushes;
A smile within his eyelids plays
And into words his longing gushes. [ Wm. R. Alger ]

Be not idle and you shall not be longing. [ English Proverb, collected by George Herbert ]

We must not stint
Our necessary actions, in the fear
To cope malicious censurers; which ever,
As ravenous fishes, do a vessel follow
That is new trimmed, but benefit no further
Than vainly longing. [ William Shakespeare, Henry VIII ]

Who to dumb forgetfulness a prey,
This pleasing anxious being ever resigned;
Left the warm precincts of the cheerful day,
Nor cast one longing lingering look behind? [ Gray ]

Don't choose me because I am faithful,
Don't choose me because I am kind,
If your heart settles on me, I'm for the taking,
Take me for longing or leave me behind. [ Mark Simos, Take Me for Longing ]

The mind of man is always longing to do something. [ Cicero ]

There is not a single heart but has its moments of longing. [ Beecher ]

How is it that the wretched have such an infatuated longing for life (the light)? [ Virgil ]

Heaven is endless longing, accompanied with an endless fruition - a longing which is blessedness, a longing which is life. [ Alexander Maclaren ]

Duty speaks with the lawful authority of many voices; pleasure has no strength except in the longing desire of the hungry unit. [ Edith Simcox ]

To have any chance of lasting, a book must satisfy, not merely some fleeting fancy of the day, but a constant longing and hunger of human nature. [ Lowell ]

Musical people are so absurdly unreasonable. They always want one to be perfectly dumb at the very moment when one is longing to be absolutely deaf. [ Oscar Wilde, An Ideal Husband ]

We gain nothing by being with such as ourselves. We encourage one another in mediocrity. I am always longing to be with men more excellent than myself. [ Lamb ]

Mannerism is always longing to have done, and has no true enjoyment in work. A genuine, really great talent, on the other hand, has its greatest happiness in execution. [ Goethe ]

It seems to me we can never give up longing and wishing while we are thoroughly alive. There are certain things we feel to be beautiful and good, and we must hunger after them. [ George Eliot ]

All was ended now, the hope and the fear and the sorrow, all the aching of heart, the restless, unsatisfied longing, fill the dull, deep pain, and constant anguish of patience. [ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow ]

God hides some ideal in every human soul. At some time in our life we feel a trembling, fearful longing to do some good thing. Life finds its noblest spring of excellence in this hidden impulse to do our best. [ Robert Collyer ]

Of God's light I was not utterly bereft, if my as yet sealed eyes, with their unspeakable longing, could nowhere see Him; nevertheless in my heart He was present and His heaven-written law still stood legible and sacred there. [ Carlyle ]

There is a mental fatigue which is a spurious kind of remorse, and has all the anguish of the nobler feeling. It is an utter weariness and prostration of spirit, a sickness of heart and mind, a bitter longing to lie down and die. [ Miss M. E. Braddon ]

Besides the pleasure derived from acquired knowledge, there lurks in the mind of man, and tinged with a shade of sadness, an unsatisfactory longing for something beyond the present, a striving towards regions yet unknown and unopened. [ Wilhelm von Humboldt ]

The absent one is an ideal person; those who are present seem to one another to be quite commonplace. It is a silly thing that the ideal is, as it were, ousted by the real; that may be the reason why to the moderns their ideal only manifests itself in longing. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]

What is it that keeps men in continual discontent and agitation? It is that they cannot make realities correspond with their conceptions, that enjoyment steals away from among their hands, that the wished-for comes too late, and nothing reached and acquired produces on the heart the effect which their longing for it at a distance led them to anticipate. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]