A Quote by Milan Kundera

The longing for Paradise is man's longing not to be man.

Milan Kundera

Quote Topics

Longing Man Paradise

Quote Author

Milan Kundera
Czechoslovakian - Writer
Born: April 1, 1929

Thinking of objects, attachment to them is formed in a man. From attachment longing, and from longing anger grows.

Swami Vivekananda

Endure what life God gives and ask no longer span; Cease to remember the delights of youth, travel-wearied aged man; Delight becomes death-longing if all longing else be vain.

William Butler Yeats

The restlessness and the longing, like the longing that is in the whistle of a faraway train. Except that the longing isn't really in the whistle—it is in you.

Meindert DeJong

For paradise we long. For perfection we were made...This longing is the source of the hunger and dissatisfaction that mark our lives...This longing makes our loves and friendships possible, and so very unsatisfactory. The hunger is for...nothing less than perfect communion with the...one in whom all the fragments of our scattered existence come together...we must not stifle this longing. It is a holy dissatisfaction. Such dissatisfaction is not a sickness to be healed, but the seed of a promise to be fulfilled...The only death to fear is the death of settling for something less.

Richard John Neuhaus

Alas, human vices, however horrible one might imagine them to be, contain the proof (were it only in their infinite expansion) of man's longing for the infinite; but it is a longing that often takes the wrong route. It is my belief that the reason behind all culpable excesses lies in this depravation of the sense of the infinite.

Charles Baudelaire

Longing, for everyone, is always there, isn't it? More intense at some times than others. You get closer to less longing - an odd metaphoric phrasing, I realize - then, you are further and longing more than ever again.

Susan Minot

There is a German word, Sehnsucht, which has no English equivalent; it means 'the longing for something'. It has Romantic and mystical connotations; C.S. Lewis defined it as the 'inconsolable longing' in the human heart for 'we know not what'. It seems rather German to be able to specify the unspecifiable. The longing for something - or, in our case, for someone.

Julian Barnes

There is a space between man's imagination and man's attainment that may only be traversed by his longing.

Khalil Gibran

Heaven is endless longing, accompanied with an endless fruition-a longing which is blessedness, a longing which is life.

Alexander MacLaren

The longing for paradise is paradise itself.

Khalil Gibran

To be perpetually longing and impatiently desirous of anything, so that a man cannot abstain from it, is to lose a man's liberty, and to become a servant of meat and drink, or smoke.

Jeremy Taylor

Like Adam, we have all lost Paradise; and yet we carry Paradise around inside of us in the form of a longing for, almost a memory of, a blessedness that is no more, or the dream of a blessedness that may someday be again.

Frederick Buechner

Longing hearts could only stand so much longing.

Margaret Mitchell

The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing — to reach the Mountain, to find the place where all the beauty came from — my country, the place where I ought to have been born. Do you think it all meant nothing, all the longing? The longing for home? For indeed it now feels not like going, but like going back.

C. S. Lewis

Longing is the fullest sense of desire; it's the most deeply felt kind of desire. I think the most interesting artwork comes out of some sense of longing. It could be called dissatisfaction; it could be called distance. There are many kinds of wanting to get closer to something else, whether that is an idea, a body, a place. Longing is also one of the conditions people approach reading, visual art, or music with - it's to satisfy that sense of longing. It's part of my job, on some level, to grapple with that notion.