A Quote by Dante Alighieri

We have no hope and yet we live in longing.

Dante Alighieri

Quote Topics

Hope Live Longing No Hope

Quote Author

Dante Alighieri
Italian - Poet
1265 - 1321

How can one live without hope and longing?

Sarah Moon

Totally without hope one cannot live. To live without hope is to cease to live. Hell is hopelessness. It is no accident that above the entrance to Dante's hell is the inscription: "Leave behind all hope, you who enter here."

Fyodor Dostoevsky

I hope you make the best of it. And I hope you see things that startle you. I hope you feel things you never felt before. I hope you meet people with a different point of view. I hope you live a life you're proud of. If you find that you're not, I hope you have the strength to start all over again.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

We may live without poetry, music and art; We may live without conscience, and live without heart; We may live without friends; we may live without books; But civilized man cannot live without cooks. . . . He may live without books,-what is knowledge but grieving? He may live without hope,-what is hope but deceiving? He may live without love,-what is passion but pining? But where is the man that can live without dining?

Robert Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Earl of Lytton

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

Nobody has seen the trekking birds take their way towards such warmer spheres as do not exist, or rivers break their course through rocks and plains to run into an ocean which is not to be found. For God does not create a longing or a hope without having a fulfilling reality ready for them. But our longing is our pledge, and blessed are the homesick, for they shall come home.

Isak Dinesen

But what, precisely, is hope? At a talk I gave last spring, someone asked me to define it. I turned the question back on the audience, and here’s the definition we all came up with: hope is a longing for a future condition over which you have no agency; it means you are essentially powerless.

Derrick Jensen

This is what it means to live on. When granted hope, a person uses it as fuel, as a guidepost to life. It is impossible to live without hope.

Haruki Murakami

The very least you can do in your life is to figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. Not admire it from a distance but live right in it, under its roof.

Barbara Kingsolver

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

Longing, the hope for fulfillment, is the one unwavering passion of the world's commerce.

E. L. Doctorow

Art is longing. You never arrive, but you keep going in the hope that you will.

Anselm Kiefer

Facing future I see hope, hope that we will survive, hope that we will prosper, hope that once again we will reap the blessings of this magical land, for without hope I cannot live, remember the past but do not dwell there, face the future where all our hopes stand.

Israel Kamakawiwo'ole

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.