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Yearning   /jˈərnɪŋ/   Listen
Yearning

noun
1.
Prolonged unfulfilled desire or need.  Synonyms: hungriness, longing.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Yearning" Quotes from Famous Books



... on through the streets. It was late, and he met no one. There had come upon him during the last hours a great yearning for his own country. He ran over in his mind, with a sense of anger against himself, the miserable wasted weeks in Calcutta—the nights in the glaring bars and halls, the friends he had made, the depths in which he had wallowed. He came to the Maidan, and, standing upon that empty plain, gazed round ...
— The Broken Road • A. E. W. Mason

... of a spirit Bow'd from its wild pride into shame. O! yearning heart! I did inherit Thy withering portion with the fame, The searing glory which hath shone Amid the jewels of my throne, Halo of Hell! and with a pain Not Hell shall make me fear again— O! craving heart, for the lost flowers And sunshine of my summer hours! Th' undying voice of that ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe

... heard John's gay voice say, as if in echo of her own thoughts. "She knew I'd want a chance to see you alone a minute.... What an awful amount of people too many there are in the world, aren't there, kiddie? I'm beginning to think with yearning of Crusoe's isle, and a barbed-wire fence ...
— The Wishing-Ring Man • Margaret Widdemer

... simply; but there was that in her voice and glance which told how she would deserve the confidence. And, on the instant, a great yearning leaped warm into her heart. If she could help this people to the ruler they needed most; if she could somehow turn the scale, so delicately balanced! There would be a task worth doing; an achievement to be proud of all her life! And she trembled a little at the thought that ...
— Affairs of State • Burton E. Stevenson

... dust and darkness children's foreheads bow, While men's labour, vain as wind or water turning Wheels and sails of dreams, makes life a leafless bough, Fell the light of scorn and pity touched with yearning, Next, from words that shone as heaven's own kindling brow.[3] Stars were these as watch-fires on the world's waste burning, Stars that fade not in the ...
— Studies in Song, A Century of Roundels, Sonnets on English Dramatic Poets, The Heptalogia, Etc - From Swinburne's Poems Volume V. • Algernon Charles Swinburne

... he did not belong to any church, and he was afraid he couldn't do Bud much good. But his tone was full of sympathy, and, what is better than sympathy, a yearning for sympathy. ...
— The Hoosier Schoolmaster - A Story of Backwoods Life in Indiana • Edward Eggleston

... the thread of the talk where it had been left the previous watch; but neither was in a talking mood, and they soon fell silent. Presently a girl's rich voice rose to the accompaniment of Oddington's banjo, an instrument but poorly adapted to the motif of the music, which was plaintive, yearning. The deep contralto notes brought full meed of meaning, although the words were German; low, deep, uncertain at first—the ponderings of love, of devotion, of doubt—then swelling loud and full and free at the end; ...
— Dan Merrithew • Lawrence Perry

... yearning that seemed to be beyond her control, she leaned her body against him. Her warm breath was on his face; her arm found its way around him and ...
— The Girl and The Bill - An American Story of Mystery, Romance and Adventure • Bannister Merwin

... wraps us in the peaceful tomb? Whom have ye laid beneath that mossy grave, Round which the slender, sunny, grass-blades wave? Who are ye calling back to tread again This weary walk of life? towards whom, in vain, Are your fond eyes and yearning hearts upraised; The young, the loved, the honoured, and the praised? Come hither;—look upon the faded cheek Of that still woman, who with eyelids meek Veils her most mournful eyes;—upon her brow Sometimes the sensitive ...
— Poems • Frances Anne Butler

... breaking from his sparkling, thrilling accompaniment into a wild human chant, his face the while triumphant and passionate, but blind with such utter blindness that he seemed like the symbol of Man's life rather than a man; a great song of heart-yearning sung to the stars and to the Infinite rather than the ...
— A Tramp's Sketches • Stephen Graham

... this attribute which causes the forever recurring dissatisfaction with the finite, which so ruthlessly pursues us through life. It is the source of that vague but tender longing, that restless but dreamy yearning, that haunting melancholy, which characterize human souls created for the enjoyment of the infinite; divining and insatiably thirsting for ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 1, July, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various

... wheel or sheet, and they let the schooners drift. And the rattle rose in Reuben's throat and he cast his soul with a cry, And "Gone already?" Tom Hall he said. "Then it's time for me to die." His eyes were heavy with great sleep and yearning for the land, And he spoke as a man that talks in dreams, his wound beneath his hand. "Oh, there comes no good o' the westering wind that backs against the sun; Wash down the decks — they're all too red — and share the ...
— Verses 1889-1896 • Rudyard Kipling

... be pursued) roamed all about the familiar rooms and corridors of the house of the principles and mysteries of insurance. His knowledge of its possibilities enabled him to develop an astonishing ingenuity in creating cases ripe and yearning for the benefits of provision against contingencies, and as he very easily was able to prove to Rosalie, and found immense delight in proving, he had under his finger, that is to say in his exquisitely arranged filing cabinets, also ...
— This Freedom • A. S. M. Hutchinson

... the ward and stood beside the bed at the farther end. The night light burned low and the features of the boy upon the bed were scarcely visible. Stooping low, a fervent "Thank God" broke from the priest's lips as he recognized in the silent figure, the boy for whom his heart had been yearning. His boy had been the one that was saved. Yes, saved from death, saved from worse than death, saved to carry out the resolutions he had made while struggling in the ...
— The Alchemist's Secret • Isabel Cecilia Williams

... Williamses presently attracted his attention and made him more observant. His income sufficed to pay the ordinary expenses of quiet domestic life, and to leave a small margin for carefully, considered amusements, but he reflected that if Selma were yearning for greater luxury, he could not afford at present to increase materially her allowance. It grieved him as a proud man to think that the woman he loved should lack any thing she desired, and without a thought of distrust he applied himself ...
— Unleavened Bread • Robert Grant

... the incident, an American work on the Netherlands, i. p. 263, and the authorities there cited.) It is contemptible on my part to speak thus frivolously of events which will stand out in such golden letters so long as America has a history, but I wanted to illustrate the yearning for sympathy which I felt. You who were among people grim and self-contained usually, who, I trust, were falling on each other's necks in the public streets, shouting, with tears in their eyes and triumph in their hearts, can ...
— Memoir of John Lothrop Motley, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... I will never forget the thrill of it. Being in love myself, as I had once thought, wasn't a circumstance to it, and the other girls were as bad as I. To help a heart-yearning, backboneless young girl escape from the captivity of a cast-iron grandparent was something no red-blooded person could refuse, and every one of us agreed that the only thing for Amy to do was to walk into the den of lions and tell the head lioness the truth; ask her permission ...
— Kitty Canary • Kate Langley Bosher

... natural that this should perplex you, and I am prepared for it. Years of lonely waiting and yearning for the love of a true heart, have, perhaps, made me seize too readily on any promise of hope and sympathy. I was certainly fascinated with Mrs. Desmonde, and told her of my feelings, prematurely as it proved, for the more I knew of her, ...
— The Harvest of Years • Martha Lewis Beckwith Ewell

... Yearning for the large excitement that the coming years would yield, Eager-hearted as a boy when first he leaves his ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various

... me flying! I try the quiet streets, but there I find an all-pervading air Of death in life, which my despair In no degree diminishes. Then homewards wend my weary way, And read dry law books as I may, No solace will they yield. And so the sad day finishes With one long sigh and yearning cry, Oh for a field, my ...
— Interludes - being Two Essays, a Story, and Some Verses • Horace Smith

... right-natured man, but possessed of a morbid self-consciousness and a limitless yet indecisive ambition. Endowed with a highly poetic nature, yet without, as it seems, adequate concentrative power; filled, at times, with a passionate yearning after God and good, yet morally unstable; he has spent much of his strength in ineffectual efforts, and he is conscious of lamentable failure and mistake in the course of his past life. Specially does he recognise ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons

... corner. angustia f. anguish. angustiado, -a anguished, distressed. angustioso, -a full of anguish, miserable, painful. anhelante adj. covetous, longing. anhelo m. desire, longing, yearning. nima f. soul. animarse take courage, become animated. nimo m. spirit, courage, mind, intention. animoso, -a spirited, gallant, brave. ansia f. longing, eagerness, anxiety, anguish. ...
— El Estudiante de Salamanca and Other Selections • George Tyler Northup

... him to leave her, but did not unclose her eyes. She could not look upon him, find know it was the last, last time, but she offered no remonstrance when he left, upon her lips a kiss so full of hopeless and yearning tenderness that it burned there many a day after he was gone. She heard him turn away, heard him cross the floor, knew he paused upon the threshold, and still her eye-lids never opened, though the hot tears rained over ...
— Darkness and Daylight • Mary J. Holmes

... blighting winds, and darksome days, that, scarcely alive, his sinking Susanna was landed at Park Gate. There she was joined by her affectionate brother, Dr. Charles, who hastened to hail her arrival, that he might convey her in his own warm carriage to her heart-yearning father, her fondly impatient brethren, and the tenderest of friends. But he found her in no state to travel: ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 3 • Madame D'Arblay

... language, that as there was to be fighting on shore, "his hand might come in play with some poor fellow or other." This singular invitation had been accepted, as well from a desire to relieve the monotony of a sea-life by any change, as perhaps with a secret yearning in the breast of the troubled divine to get as nigh to terra firma as possible. Accordingly, after the Pilot had landed with his boisterous party, the sailing-master and the chaplain, together with ...
— The Pilot • J. Fenimore Cooper

... gave vent to hers. Christopher was vexed with himself for so nearly breaking down before Elisabeth, and throwing the shadow of his sorrow across the sunshine of her path. He did not know that the mother-heart in her was yearning over him with a tenderness almost too powerful to be resisted, and that his weakness was constraining her as his strength had never done. He was rather surprised that she did not speak to him; but with the patient simplicity of a ...
— The Farringdons • Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler

... death of Dido, are depicted in a series of scenes of such picturesqueness and power, such languor and pathos, as surely cannot be matched outside the finest pages of Wagner. A time will certainly come when this great work, informed throughout with a passionate yearning for the loftiest ideal of art, will receive the recognition which is its due. Of late indeed there have been signs of a revival of interest in Berlioz's mighty drama, and the recent performances of 'Les Troyens' in Paris and Brussels have opened the eyes of many musicians to its manifold beauties. ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild

... is thy brow, my son! and I am chill, As to my bosom I have tried to press thee! How was I wont to feel my pulses thrill, Like a rich harp-string, yearning to caress thee, And hear thy sweet 'My father!' from those ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick

... cathedrals and a historic religious ritual, and had but a vague and remote charm for the woodman in the pine forests of Maine and the farmer on the Illinois prairie, yet the "Psalm of Life" was the very heart-beat of the American conscience, and the "Footsteps of Angels" was a hymn of the fond yearning of ...
— Literary and Social Essays • George William Curtis

... gave his twenty-five grandchildren a vacation one summer, still holds the memory of that wondrous flute and yet more marvellous nature among the "strong, sweet trees, like brawny men with virgins' hearts." From its ferns and mosses and "reckless vines" and priestly oaks lifting yearning arms toward the stars, Lanier returned to Oglethorpe as a tutor. Here amid hard work and haunting suggestions of a coming poem, "The Jacquerie," he tried to work out the problem of ...
— Literary Hearthstones of Dixie • La Salle Corbell Pickett

... what he preached. Honour, glory and distinction were the whole object of his life, and that dear domestic happiness never abstracted his attention." He did, indeed, rail at marriage[57] during his last cruise, now fast approaching; but his passionate devotion to Lady Hamilton, and his yearning for home, knew no abatement. Yet, through all and over all, the love of glory and the sense of honor continued to the last to reign supreme. "Government cannot be more anxious for my departure," he tells St. Vincent, "than I am, ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. II. (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan

... all, high and low, they are tempted by the public demand for sophistry, the ready market for pills. A Henry Bordeaux, in France, is an exception; in England he is the rule. The endless thirst to be soothed with cocksure asseverations, the great mob yearning to be dosed and comforted, is the undoing, over there, of three imaginative ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken

... window-pane. From the moment she had felt within her the vague stirrings of womanhood, she had been wont to gaze upon the blue-back hills to the east, to the horizon out west, wondering what mysteries lay beyond, and yearning to encounter them. Perhaps it was the sea-faring instinct, the Wanderlust of her forebears; perhaps it was a keener appreciation of the mediocrity of Port Agnew than others in the little town possessed, a realization that she had more to give to life ...
— Kindred of the Dust • Peter B. Kyne

... unnatural brother if he had not," answered Jenny, her own heart yearning more tenderly towards her sister, whose gentle ...
— The English Orphans • Mary Jane Holmes

... solemn mysterious shroud With a vague and insatiate yearning, And perceive but the sombre exterior cloud, With ...
— Mountain idylls, and Other Poems • Alfred Castner King

... "put off these webs of death, Distract this leaden yearning of thine eyes From lichened banks of peace, sad mysteries Of dust fallen-in where passed the flitting breath: Turn thy sick thoughts from him that slumbereth In mouldered linen to the living skies, The sun's bright-clouded principalities, The salt deliciousness ...
— Collected Poems 1901-1918 in Two Volumes - Volume I. • Walter de la Mare

... active. Several times since he had come to Roville he had been conscious of a sensation which he could not understand, a vague, yearning sensation, a feeling that, splendid as everything was in this paradise of colour, there was nevertheless something lacking. Now he understood. You had to be in love to get the full flavour of these vivid whites ...
— The Man Upstairs and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse

... to serve our Lord alone.' Bonaventura, who tells the story, goes on, with the true spirit of a monkish historian, to state how, 'the tempter being vanquished, departed, and the holy man returned victorious to his cell.' The piteous human yearning that is underneath this wild tale, the sudden access of self-pity and anger, mixed with a strange attempt, not less piteous than the longing, at self-consolation—all the struggle and conflict of emotion which stilled themselves, at least for a moment, by ...
— Game and Playe of the Chesse - A Verbatim Reprint Of The First Edition, 1474 • Caxton

... truthful answer. For, as if an obscuring veil had suddenly been rent that morning, she was permitted at last to see Peter Blood in his true relations to other men, and that sight, vouchsafed her twenty-four hours too late, filled her with pity and regret and yearning. ...
— Captain Blood • Rafael Sabatini

... Yule was evidently yearning for his after-dinner nap, and Mark for his cigar, Moor followed his friend, and they stepped through the window into the garden, now lovely with the fading ...
— Moods • Louisa May Alcott

... motion had ceased, and that the sides and floor of the fo'c'sle were in the places where people of regular habits would expect to find them. The other bunks were empty, and, after a toilet hastened by a yearning for nourishment, he ...
— Many Cargoes • W.W. Jacobs

... let him enjoy a moment's peace. Seneca analyses his complaint, and expounds it with a vivid clearness which betrays a first-hand acquaintance with its symptoms. If to that anguish of a spirit that preys on itself could be added the pains of a yearning unknown to antiquity, we might say that Seneca was enlightening or comforting a Werther ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell

... feeling—that he should mope and pine, like a wild animal in a cage, under confinement in an office, only varied from morning to evening by commercial walking expeditions of a miserable mile or two in close and crowded streets. These forebodings—to say nothing of his natural yearning towards adventure, change of scene, and exhilarating bodily exertion—would have been sufficient of themselves to have decided him to leave his home, and battle his way through the world (he cared not where or how, so long as he battled ...
— Hide and Seek • Wilkie Collins

... this, but never a home!" The timid girl had seen no beloved woman's face upon the fretwork of the walls of this Aladdin's castle. And, in her own frightened heart, she remembered the ashen pallor of her father's face when she had faltered out the burning question of her yearning heart—the question of long years! The past was still a blank to her, while on this same night, crafty Alan Hawke in Delhi, and, in far Calcutta, a woman, pacing her boudoir in sad unrest, were both busied with the story of the vanished mother whom the ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage

... only made them more anxious to go. It is another case of "like father like son." If I had not travelled while young, I am sure I should never have settled down. And the fact that in every place I visited I found scores of Englishmen yearning to return home made me feel that I was a fortunate man to see our distant possessions without being doomed to pass my life in exile. I have sufficient money to keep a home for my children, but I want my sons to ...
— Chatterbox, 1905. • Various

... worldly ambition was the old curiosity to see the world and know all sorts of men—to be tried and tested. More powerful than any theory of education was the yearning for far-off, foreign things, and ...
— English Travellers of the Renaissance • Clare Howard

... his ideal? Oh, no! On the contrary, his passion grows stronger every day. This is proved by his frequent allusions to her whom he never names, and by those words of restless yearning and heart-rending despair that cannot be read without exciting a pitiful sympathy. As before long we shall get better acquainted with the lady and hear more of her—she being on the point of leaving the comparative privacy of the Conservatorium for ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks

... Frumentius, whose heart was yearning over the country to which he owed so much, had come straight to the Patriarch of Alexandria to beg of him that he would send a Bishop to preside over the growing number of churches in Abyssinia and to preach the Faith in the districts where it ...
— Saint Athanasius - The Father of Orthodoxy • F.A. [Frances Alice] Forbes

... left her own during the long outburst. He had never doubted her sincerity nor her kindliness, but now, as he listened, there stole over him a yearning, strange in one so habitually reticent, to share with her the secret he had hidden all ...
— Felix O'Day • F. Hopkinson Smith

... with that clear, disarming gaze that she knew how to achieve so perfectly. He felt a great yearning overwhelm him ... a desire to meet her halfway ... a vagrant displeasure ...
— Broken to the Plow • Charles Caldwell Dobie

... There have been many, many men, my friend, who have looked upon Zoraida Castelmar as they look. Until you came there has been no man who turned his head away." Again she sighed unhiddenly. Her eyes melted into his, yearning, promising, beseeching. "And to you I have offered what would have made any other ...
— Daughter of the Sun - A Tale of Adventure • Jackson Gregory

... gowned with jewels on her brow and patrician suitors at her feet vying with one another to pay their devoirs to her. Mayhap it was this, the love that might have been, that lent to her softlyfeatured face at whiles a look, tense with suppressed meaning, that imparted a strange yearning tendency to the beautiful eyes, a charm few could resist. Why have women such eyes of witchery? Gerty's were of the bluest Irish blue, set off by lustrous lashes and dark expressive brows. Time was when those brows were not so silkily seductive. It was Madame Vera Verity, directress ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce

... youthful gravity, gave to her figure the charming maturity of a young widow, that he was for a moment awed and embarrassed. But he experienced a relief when she came eagerly toward him in all her old girlish frankness, and with even something of yearning ...
— Trent's Trust and Other Stories • Bret Harte

... in him at once the intensest yearning after his father and the haunts of his boyhood, and the wildest dread that ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume V. • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.

... won my heart. This was the first affection of my life. It took up its abode in me side by side with a violent love for his daughter, nor did I even dream of pitting one of these feelings against the other. I was all yearning, all instinct, all desire. I had the passions of a man in ...
— Mauprat • George Sand

... friend, and uttered such lofty things over it as are rarely heard upon the lips of man. And so with living lyrists each after his kind. Lord Tennyson listens and looks until it strikes him out an undying note of passion, or yearning, or regret— ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley

... everywhere. Gray-haired parents knelt at the grave of the boy whose enviable fortune it was to be brought home in time to die in his mother's room. Towards the nameless mounds of Arlington, of Gettysburg, and the rest, the yearning of desolated homes went out in those waves of anguish which seem to choke the very air that the happier ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. 6, No. 5, April, 1896 • Various

... ye homes of living men! I have no relish for your pleasures— In the human face I nothing ken That with my spirit's yearning measures. I long for onward bliss to be, A day of joy, a brighter morrow; And from this bondage to be free, Farewell thou ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 14, - Issue 389, September 12, 1829 • Various

... of the girl's eager eyes. The color fled from her face. She had endured too many extremes of emotion in one day. Miss Mehitable extended her arms to her with a yearning smile. Geraldine glided to her and quietly fainted ...
— In Apple-Blossom Time - A Fairy-Tale to Date • Clara Louise Burnham

... she'd got herself a man again, a man who was adequate in the primal clutch (I gave myself that pat on the back), and that she wouldn't have to be plagued and have her safety endangered by that kind of mind-dulling restlessness and yearning for a while. ...
— The Night of the Long Knives • Fritz Reuter Leiber

... up to his ankles in peaty ground, now tearing his shins, now bruising his knees, Spargo, yearning for the London lights, the well-paved London streets, the convenient taxi-cab, even the humble omnibus, plodded forward after his guide. It seemed to him that they had walked for ages and had traversed a whole continent of mountains and valley when at last Breton, halting on the ...
— The Middle Temple Murder • J.S. Fletcher

... souls; he traced all beliefs in immortality to the longing of those who were unfortunate here (and who did not think himself so?) for a recompense (a revenge he called it) hereafter, and declared transmigration to be at once the most ingenious and the most picturesque embodiment of this yearning. He played billiards extremely well, and excused his skill on the ground that he was compelled to pass the time while foreign diplomatists and his own colleagues were making up their mind. I do not think that he ever hesitated as to what he had best do. He was of an extremely placid and happy ...
— The King's Mirror • Anthony Hope

... to keep awake until then, but as the room grew darker and darker, and nothing happened, the yearning to fall asleep became actual agony. It was a rather large, square room, crowded up with a jumble of antiquities. The only real furniture was the window-seat on which I knelt, and an oblong table; but even the table was laid on its side to make room for a battered Roman bust standing on the floor ...
— Jimgrim and Allah's Peace • Talbot Mundy

... diseased thoughts and harmonizing them, Nurse would become once more composed; the phantom danger was again put off, and the violinist would presently fall into silence,—sometimes into sleep. But still, while he slept, the witch-eye watched him; though with an expression of yearning, uncouth intensity which seldom ventured forth while ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne

... Victoria Porter had a black skin, she had a tender, loving heart, and she had pored over the Christ-life until she had unconsciously imbibed its spirit. She was always yearning to comfort some one. Later in the day she stood at the door of the white mansion, holding her precious lilies. "They're for his mother," she said to Dinah. "Tell her we chil'ens loved Frankie, ...
— The American Missionary — Volume 39, No. 03, March, 1885 • Various

... ..." was all he said gruffly, but with a something so youthful in manner and sentiment that Boase had a yearning over him as in the days when he had been ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse

... tenth. Yet now and then some complacent blind idiot says, "You unanointed are coarse clay and useless; you are not as we, the regenerators of the world; go, bury yourselves elsewhere, for we cannot take the responsibility of recommending idlers and sinners to the yearning mercy of Heaven." How does a soul like that stay in a carcass without getting mixed with the secretions and sweated out through the pores? Think of this insect condemning the whole theatrical service as a disseminator of bad morals because it has ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine

... overpoweringly over him. At such moments he fancied that a girl came stealing through the trees to him; that she slipped her hand into his own; that she lifted to his her soft eyes; that something within the soul of him spoke to her and that she answered. His pulses quickened; a great yearning as of infinite hunger possessed him. He remembered how they had stood together upon the ridge the last time; how his arms had been opening for her; the look in her eyes. That had been a moment when the world had lain ...
— The Everlasting Whisper • Jackson Gregory

... being there is the desire to rise to something great. The most thoughtless boy on the street looks serious as the Presidential carriage rolls past. In the deep recesses of his nature there is kindled by the spectacle a momentary yearning for fame—he would like to be President some day. Likewise does every man, when he seriously views the pageantry of life's ideals and purposes, have aspiration, for such is the ...
— A Fleece of Gold - Five Lessons from the Fable of Jason and the Golden Fleece • Charles Stewart Given

... latter had at some time in the past crossed the Rhine, cut off portions of their territory, and, holding hostages of theirs, had rendered them tributaries. And because they happened to be asking what Caesar was yearning for, they easily persuaded him ...
— Dio's Rome • Cassius Dio

... coming to look upon as another form of heat, is properly applied. It must be so, and it is the manifest destiny of the race to improve it. Man is a spirit cursed with a mortal body, which glues him to the earth, and his yearning to rise, which is innate, is, I believe, only a part of his probation and trial." "Show us how it can be done," shouted his listeners in chorus. "Apergy is and must be able to do it," Ayrault continued. "Throughout Nature we find ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds • J. J. Astor

... sounds inharmonious and unpleasing to the ear"; whereas, although, out of music, discord means a sound inharmonious and displeasing to the ear, in music discord is the golden bond of harmony, the life and soul of expression, that for which the ear yearns with a yearning that is inexpressible, and enjoys with poignancy of pleasure. We asked, too, if Thomas Dowse should be honored with a page and a half, in which his fall from a tree, his rheumatic fever, and the head winds which prevented him ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 27, January, 1860 • Various

... not the leisure Of gardened country seats, The fountains on the terrace against the summer heats— The city for my yearning, My spending and my earning. Her winding ways for learning, Sing hey! ...
— Songs for a Little House • Christopher Morley

... quickened and her cheeks grew pink. Her eyes lost their yearning look and her lips ...
— The Tangled Threads • Eleanor H. Porter

... if she tried to come, Would falter and fail, with yearning weak; At the first of the road they would falter and pause, And the way ...
— Indian Poetry • Edwin Arnold

... like twin swans that oar the surgy storms To bate with pennoned snows in candent air: Nigh with abased head, Yourselves linked sisterly, that sister-pair, And go in presence there; Saying—"Your young eyes cannot see our forms, Nor read the yearning of our looks aright; But time shall trail the veilings from our hair, And cleanse your seeing with his euphrasy, (Yea, even your bright seeing make more bright, Which is all sights' delight), And ye shall know us for ...
— Sister Songs • Francis Thompson

... my soul, as I stood shut apart there from those living men, within reach of their hands, within range of their eyes, within the vibration of their human breath. I looked into the animal's eyes with the yearning of a sudden and an awful ...
— The Gates Between • Elizabeth Stuart Phelps

... to propose to Maimie McFarlane once, and she was sensible enough to refuse me. What I should have done had she accepted me, I can't imagine; for that was three years ago, and I have more ties and less prospect of marriage now than then. Well, there's no use yearning for what you can't have, and there's no other man living to whom I would speak about the matter at all; but life is a deadly, lonely thing when a man has no one on his side but himself. Why is it that I am sitting here ...
— The Stark Munro Letters • J. Stark Munro

... asked that question, he frequently used to ask it himself, and his wife—the sainted Amy Snurge of ever revered memory—would rest her thin, ascetic hand upon his coat sleeve and answer him with yearning ...
— Terribly Intimate Portraits • Noel Coward

... a most unpleasant feature: That not a rose without sharp thorns doth grow, Much as love's yearning stirs our human nature, Through pangs of parting we at last must go. From thy dear eyes, when I my fate was trying, A gleam of love and joy streamed forth to me: Preserve thee God! my joy seemed then undying, Preserve thee God! such joy ...
— The Trumpeter of Saekkingen - A Song from the Upper Rhine. • Joseph Victor von Scheffel

... character, especially as regarded difficulty of breathing. She was compelled to sit up continually, almost to the hour of her death. Yet in the moment of expected dissolution, so generous was her nature, her heart was yearning for blessings on others rather than herself. At one time just before her death she requested her pastor to remember in his prayer an absent sister, that she might recover from a critical illness; and in one of his last interviews ...
— Our Gift • Teachers of the School Street Universalist Sunday School, Boston

... else?" A strange yearning look comes into his eyes. "God knows it is all I think of," ...
— A Little Rebel • Mrs. Hungerford

... joysome gist of my remarks! I can't tell you how I'm pining and yearning to see her. She seems like a girl out of a story. To think of it! Rona Mitchell at ...
— For the Sake of the School • Angela Brazil

... to Paul Mario as pure air to the general. Deliberate ugliness hurt him, and the ugliness which is the handiwork of God aroused within him a yearning sorrow for poor humanity who might be of the White Company, were it not for avarice, hate and lust. The war, even in its earlier phases, stirred the ultimate deeps of his nature, and knowing himself, since genius cannot be blind, for what he was, a world power, a spiritual sword, he ...
— The Orchard of Tears • Sax Rohmer

... happiness of the childhood of the world, to bring back a golden age of liberty and equality. Locke's "state of peace, goodwill, mutual assistance, and preservation" is to be the desire of nations, and with wistful yearning Rousseau's disciples gazed on the picture painted ...
— The Rise of the Democracy • Joseph Clayton

... "Iliad," with a great bale-fire. Two closing lines record like an epitaph the praise of the dead in superlatives; not as a warrior, but as a man and a ruler: how that he was towards men the mildest and most affable, towards his people he was most gracious and most yearning for their esteem. ...
— Anglo-Saxon Literature • John Earle

... held the razor and looked into the glass; then he beheld the room behind his back, but he could not see his face, and all at once he realised how matters stood. Now he was filled with a passionate yearning to find himself again. He had given the best part of himself to his wife, for she had his will, and so he decided ...
— In Midsummer Days and Other Tales • August Strindberg

... bewildering. With a far-away look in his eyes, pain trembling through each note of his musical, soft voice, he would with bitter jest, with passionate outburst, recount how he had sobbed beneath the stars for love of Isabel, bitten his own flesh in frenzied yearning for Lenore. He appeared from his own account—if in connection with a theme so poetical I may be allowed a commonplace expression—to have had no luck with any of them. Of the remainder, an appreciable percentage had been mere passing visions, seen at a distance in the dawn, at twilight—generally ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome

... lying on his knees, receiving contentedly and happily the good things he gave him, but never looking up to find the eyes of him from whom the good gifts came. And now the heart of the old man, touched by the motion of the child's heart—yearning after her Father in heaven, and yet scarcely believing that he could be so good as her father on earth—began to stir uneasily within him. And he went down on his knees and hid his face in ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald

... Southern Negro colleges there were, in the same three periods, 143, 413, and over 500 graduates. Here, then, is the plain thirst for training; by refusing to give this Talented Tenth the key to knowledge can any sane man imagine that they will lightly lay aside their yearning and contentedly become hewers of wood and ...
— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue • Various

... once before—on that odd uncomfortable night when he made her sit with him on the Embankment. Whenever it came it seemed to upset her dominant impression of him. But yet it excited her too—it appealed to something undeveloped—some yearning, protecting instinct which ...
— Sir George Tressady, Vol. I • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... either of these, however, Phil believed his chum was yearning for a variety in the bill of fare. Quail on toast would strike Larry about right; or even rabbit or squirrel stew; provided the meat for the pot were the product of his skill as ...
— Chums in Dixie - or The Strange Cruise of a Motorboat • St. George Rathborne

... vague meaning—and though it often may seem coldly critical of things metaphysical, it has not been written with indifference to that great, perhaps the greatest, urge of the human heart—the craving for spiritual truth—our yearning for the higher potentialities of that which we call "mind," "soul" and "spirit"—but it has been written with the deep desire to find the source of these qualities, their scientific significance and a scientific proof ...
— Manhood of Humanity. • Alfred Korzybski

... youth, for sacred Phoebus' sake! I know thine inmost bosom, and I feel A very brother's yearning for thee steal Into mine own: for why? thou openest The prison gates that have so long opprest My weary watching. Though thou know'st it not, Thou art commission'd to this fated spot For great enfranchisement. O weep no more; 300 I am ...
— Endymion - A Poetic Romance • John Keats

... of this feminine evening. The fashionable crowd had moved out upon the lawn; the white dresses were phantom blue, and the men's coats faded into obscure masses, darkening the gathering shadows. It was the moment when voices soften, and every heart, overpowered with yearning, is impelled to tell of grief and disillusion; and every moment the wail of the fiddles grew more unbearable, tearing the heart to ...
— Vain Fortune • George Moore

... of gold—have never yet inspired those who dwell upon them with songs uprising from the soil. The solitude of the hills over whose tops the summer sun seems to linger so long has not filled the shepherd's heart with a wistful yearning that must be expressed in verse or music. Neither he nor the ploughman in the vale have heard or seen aught that stirs them in Nature. The shepherd has never surprised an Immortal reclining on the thyme under the shade ...
— Hodge and His Masters • Richard Jefferies

... for his neighbours, depositing his burden at their doors, without a word of thanks for his help being vouchsafed to him. Now and then he overheard a sneer at his usefulness; and his mother taunted him often for his patience and forbearance. But he went on his way silently with deeper yearning for human love and sympathy than he could ...
— Stories By English Authors: France • Various

... of lupines damp with the dew of dawn. Their eyes met, the glance held, welded. For a moment the circuit was formed, polarity effected. For a moment Sandy looked deep and then Molly's eyes hazed with tenderness, with a yearning that made Sandy's heart constrict, that warned him his emotions were getting beyond control, his own eyes betraying him. He summoned his will. His face hardened to the effort, his eyes steeled. Molly's face flushed rose, from the line of her white linen riding stock up to ...
— Rimrock Trail • J. Allan Dunn

... could not help yearning over this faulty, well-beloved scapegrace Tom, or help thinking, with a little thrill of hope, "If Trix only cared for his money, she may cast him off now he 's lost it; but I 'll love him all the better because he 's poor." With this feeling warm at her heart, I don't wonder that Polly's ...
— An Old-fashioned Girl • Louisa May Alcott

... became so sad, that his benignant listener, divining that around the image of Helen there clung some passionate grief that overshadowed all worldly success, drew Leonard gently and gently on, till the young man, long yearning for some confidant, told him all,—how, faithful through long years to one pure and ardent memory, Helen had been seen once more, the child ripened to woman, and the memory revealing ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... I was not deceived about myself; I knew that I should never be a scholar. I could never lose myself for long among impersonal things. Mental excitement was apt to send me with a rush back to my own naked land and the figures scattered upon it. While I was in the very act of yearning toward the new forms that Cleric brought up before me, my mind plunged away from me, and I suddenly found myself thinking of the places and people of my own infinitesimal past. They stood out strengthened and simplified now, like the ...
— My Antonia • Willa Cather

... AGRICULTURIST, OYVIND THORESEN PLADSEN:— As I have told you before, Oyvind, he who walks with God has come into the good inheritance. But now you must listen to my advice, and that is not to take the world with yearning and tribulation, but to trust in God and not allow your heart to consume you, for if you do you will have another god besides Him. Next I must inform you that your father and your mother are well, but I am troubled with one of my hips; for now the war breaks out afresh with all that was suffered ...
— A Happy Boy • Bjornstjerne Bjornson

... high up in learning The secrets of nations long dead; But he cared more for those who were yearning Sad ...
— Adventures and Recollections • Bill o'th' Hoylus End

... a resource against ennui on rainy days and foggy days and days that were going to clear up later. All these sorts were devised by the malignity of Providence for the confusion of small boys yearning to be on active service, redistributing property, obstructing traffic, or calling attention to personal peculiarities of harmless passers-by. But it was not so inexhaustible but that cases occurred when those children got ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan

... natural yearning of humanity, to afford not only to every foreigner but to every native in the land an opportunity of beholding the three heroes who had reflected such indelible glory on the American name, and to do it all in a manner eminently ...
— All Around the Moon • Jules Verne

... of passionate yearning. He laughed, trying to appear at ease. Some sort of an understanding must be had with Diana sooner or later, and she might as well realize at this present interview that the old relations could not be restored. His ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces in Society • Edith Van Dyne

... of those earlier meetings. Hearing the tolling bell she strove to relive them, and found she did so with singularly mounting wealth and precision of detail. Not only vision but sense pushed backward and inward, revitalizing what had been; until she ached with suspense and yearning, shrewdly evaded dangers, surmounted obstructions by action at once bold and wary and tasted the transfiguring rapture ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet

... the pearly gates into the city" she uttered an audible thanksgiving that she was at last where neither sin, sorrow, nor death could have any dominion. No words can do justice to this event like her own, written in her journal at that time. The pages recall all a mother's love and yearning tenderness, together with ...
— Elizabeth Fry • Mrs. E. R. Pitman

... of his nature, affectionateness seems to have been the most ardent and most deep. A disposition, on his own side, to form strong attachments, and a yearning desire after affection in return, were the feeling and the want that formed the dream and torment of his existence. We have seen with what passionate enthusiasm he threw himself into his boyish friendships. The all-absorbing and unsuccessful love that followed ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. I. (of VI.) - With his Letters and Journals. • Thomas Moore

... even add to their stock of learning? We see Solon, for instance, boasting in his poems that he grows old "daily learning something new." Or again in my own case, it was only when an old man that I became acquainted with Greek literature, which in fact I absorbed with such avidity—in my yearning to quench, as it were, a long-continued thirst—that I became acquainted with the very facts which you see me now using as precedents. When I heard what Socrates had done about the lyre I should have liked ...
— Treatises on Friendship and Old Age • Marcus Tullius Cicero



Words linked to "Yearning" :   wishfulness, pining, yen, yearn, desire, discontentment, discontent, discontentedness, nostalgia, hankering, wistfulness



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