Quotes about hunger (513 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

“The secret of spiritual success is a hunger that persists…It is an awful condition to be satisfied with one’s spiritual attainments…God was and is looking for hungry, thirsty people.”

Smith Wigglesworth (1859–1947) British evangelist

God , People , Secret , Success

“Man is the only real enemy we have. Remove Man from the scene, and the root cause of hunger and overwork is abolished forever.”

George Orwell book Animal Farm

Source: Animal Farm

“People hunger for love, and clowning is a trick to get love close.”

Patch Adams (1945) Physician, activist, diplomat, author

As quoted in "Patch Adams and clowns spreading laughter at hospital" (2 March 2016) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Gtw5nzgYpA
Context: You know, it's always the same. I've clowned in 81 countries. People hunger for love, and clowning is a trick to get love close. As a clown I can do things that people are too frightened of Love to allow you to do.

Love , People

“Love me or hate me, it's one or the other. Always has been. Hate my game, my swagger. Hate my fadeaway, my hunger. Hate that I'm a veteran. A champion. Hate that. Hate it with all your heart. And hate that I'm loved, for the exact same reasons.”

Kobe Bryant (1978–2020) American basketball player

Hate , Game , Heart , Love

“To be a vegetarian is to disagree — to disagree with the course of things today. Starvation, world hunger, cruelty, waste, wars — we must make a statement against these things. Vegetarianism is my statement. And I think it’s a strong one.”

Isaac Bashevis Singer (1902–1991) Polish-born Jewish-American author

Preface to Food for the Spirit: Vegetarianism and the World Religions by Steven Rosen (New York: Bala Books, 1987, )
Variant: To be a vegetarian is to disagree - to disagree with the course of things today... starvation, cruelty - we must make a statement against these things. Vegetarianism is my statement. And I think it's a strong one.
Context: Vegetarianism is my religion. I became a consistent vegetarian some twenty-three years ago. Before that, I would try over and over again. But it was sporadic. Finally, in the mid-1960s, I made up my mind. And I've been a vegetarian ever since. When a human kills an animal for food, he is neglecting his own hunger for justice. Man prays for mercy, but is unwilling to extend it to others. Why should man then expect mercy from God? It's unfair to expect something that you are not willing to give. … This is my protest against the conduct of the world. To be a vegetarian is to disagree — to disagree with the course of things today. Nuclear power, starvation, cruelty — we must make a statement against these things. Vegetarianism is my statement. And I think it's a strong one.

War , World , Thinking , Strong

“If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a dog and man.”

Mark Twain (1835–1910) American author and humorist

Variant: If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a dog and a man.

Dogs

“My teacher said once that every man faces seven enemies in his lifetime. Sickness, hunger, betrayal, envy, greed, old age, and then death…”

Osamu Tezuka (1928–1989) Japanese cartoonist and animator

Death , Age , Teachers , Betrayal

“… no one ever became excellent in any exercise whatsoever without beginning from his childhood to endure heat, cold, hunger, thirst, and other discomforts; wherefore those men are entirely deceived who think to be able, at their ease and with all the comforts of the world, to attain an honorable rank. It is not by sleeping but by waking and studying continually that progress is made. [on Luca Della Robbia]”

Giorgio Vasari (1511–1574) Italian painter, architect, writer and historian

Men , World , Exercises , Thinking

“The place where God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger coincide.”

Frederick Buechner (1926) Poet, novelist, short story writer, theologian

Wishful Thinking, p. 95
Variant: Vocation is the place where our deep gladness meets the world's deep need.
Source: Wishful Thinking: A Theological ABC (1973)

God , World

“We need houses as we need clothes, architecture stimulates fashion. It’s like hunger and thirst — you need them both.”

Karl Lagerfeld (1933–2019) German fashion designer

Fashion , Housing , Clothes

“It is not good for all our wishes to be filled; through sickness we recognize the value of health; through evil, the value of good; through hunger, the value of food; through exertion, the value of rest.”

Dorothy Canfield Fisher (1879–1958) American author and social activist

Health , Food , Evil

“Only old Benjamin professed to remember every detail of his long life and to know that things never had been, nor ever could be much better or much worse--hunger, hardship, and disappointment being, so he said, the unalterable law of life.”

George Orwell book Animal Farm

Source: Animal Farm

Life , Law , Disappointment

“When a human kills an animal for food, he is neglecting his own hunger for justice. Man prays for mercy, but is unwilling to extend it to others. Why should man then expect mercy from God? It's unfair to expect something that you are not willing to give. It is inconsistent. I can never accept inconsistency or injustice. Even if it comes from God. If there would come a voice from God saying, "I'm against vegetarianism!" I would say, "Well, I am for it!" This is how strongly I feel in this regard.”

Isaac Bashevis Singer (1902–1991) Polish-born Jewish-American author

God , Justice , Food , Feeling

“Hunger reduces one to an utterly spineless, brainless condition, more like the after-effects of influenza than anything else. It is as though all one's blood had been pumped out and lukewarm water substituted.”

George Orwell book Down and Out in Paris and London

Source: Down and out in Paris and London (1933), Ch. 7

Water

“The hunger for love is much more difficult to remove than the hunger for bread.”

Matka Tereza (1910–1997) Roman Catholic saint of Albanian origin

Interview by Edward W. Desmond in TIME magazine (4 December 1989)
1980s

Depressing , For Him , Love

“There are wars in this world, not because wars are the will of God but because of greed and arrogance, the lust for power and domination. There is hunger not merely because there is lack of food, but because of political and economic policies that foster inequality of the distribution of resources, because of one-sided control of world markets by powerful nations who refuse to enter seriously in the search for a more just, equitable, and sustainable economic order.”

Allan Boesak (1946) South African anti-apartheid activist

Source: Comfort and Protest (1987), p. 67

God , War , World , Food

“We keep falling into the same ditches, you know? I mean, we learn more and more about the physical universe, more about our own bodies, more technology, but somehow, down through history, we go on building empires of one kind or another, then destroying them in one way or another. We go on having stupid wars that we justify and get passionate about, but in the end, all they do is kill huge numbers of people, maim others, impoverish still more, spread disease and hunger, and set the stage for the next war. And when we look at all of that in history, we just shrug our shoulders and say, well, that’s the way things are. That’s the way things always have been.”

Octavia E. Butler book Parable of the Talents

Source: Parable of the Talents (1998), Chapter 20 (p. 392)

War , People , Stupidity , Disease

“We have a hunger for something like authenticity, but are easily satisfied by an ersatz facsimile.”

George Orwell (1903–1950) English author and journalist

Actually a statement by Miles Orvell, in The Real Thing: Imitation and Authenticity in American Culture, 1880–1940 (1989)
Misattributed

“To describe my despair would be impossible. No words could tell it. I was buried alive, with the prospect before me of dying of hunger and thirst.”

Jules Verne book A Journey to the Center of the Earth

Je ne puis peindre mon désespoir; nul mot de la langue humaine ne rendrait mes sentiments. J’étais enterré vif, avec la perspective de mourir dans les tortures de la faim et de la soif.
Source: Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864), Ch. XXVII: Lost in the bowels of the earth

Despair

“You discover boredom and mean complications and the beginnings of hunger, but you also discover the great redeeming feature of poverty: the fact that it annihilates the”

George Orwell book Down and Out in Paris and London

Source: Down and out in Paris and London (1933), Ch. 3
Context: For, when you are approaching poverty, you make one discovery which outweighs some of the others. You discover boredom and mean complications and the beginnings of hunger, but you also discover the great redeeming feature of poverty: the fact that it annihilates the future. Within certain limits, it is actually true that the less money you have, the less you worry. When you have a hundred francs in the world you are liable to the most craven panics. When you have only three francs you are quite indifferent; for three francs will feed you till tomorrow, and you cannot think further than that. You are bored, but you are not afraid. You think vaguely, 'I shall be starving in a day or two--shocking, isn't it?' And then the mind wanders to other topics. A bread and margarine diet does, to some extent, provide its own anodyne. And there is another feeling that is a great consolation in poverty. I believe everyone who has been hard up has experienced it. It is a feeling of relief, almost of pleasure, at knowing yourself at last genuinely down and out. You have talked so often of going to the dogs--and well, here are the dogs, and you have reached them, and you can stand it. It takes off a lot of anxiety.

“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.”

Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890–1969) American general and politician, 34th president of the United States (in office from 1953 to 1961)

1950s, The Chance for Peace (1953)
Context: Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. This is, I repeat, the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron. … Is there no other way the world may live?

Money , Children , World , Hope

“… to speak of them out loud, to speak of their hunger and pain and loneliness and humour, to make them visible so that can not be ravaged in the dark without great consequence.”

Eve Ensler book The Vagina Monologues

Source: The Vagina Monologues

Pain , Loneliness

“Give me hunger, pain and want,
Shut me out with shame and failure
From your doors of gold and fame,
Give me your shabbiest, weariest hunger!

But leave me a little love.”

Carl Sandburg book Chicago Poems

Source: Chicago Poems

Love , Pain , Failure

“but what should we do when the highborn and wealthy take to crime? Indeed, if a poor man will spend a year in prison for stealing out of hunger, how high would the gallows need to be to hang the rich man who breaks the law out of greed?”

Terry Pratchett book Snuff

Source: Snuff

Law

“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. How can we ever be satisfied without them until our feelings are deadened?”

George Eliot book The Mill on the Floss

The Mill on the Floss (1860)

Beauty , Feeling

“My hunger and curiosity drive me forward in all directions at once.”

Henry Miller book Plexus

Source: The Rosy Crucifixion II: Plexus (1953), p. 61

“Festivals that common men celebrate, are hunger and thirst to them, intoxicated in Allah's love they fast Eid and joy they never celebrate”

Shah Abdul Latif Bhittai book Shah Jo Risalo

Shah Abdul Latif Bhittai, Shah Jo Risalo
Shah Jo Risalo

Love , Men , Joy

“Allah has imposed fasting so that the wealthy might suffer hunger and be kind to the poor.”

Hasan al-Askari (846–874) Eleventh of the Twelve Imams

al-Shaykh al-Sadūq, Man lā Yahdharul Faqīh, vol.2, p. 43
Religious Wisdom

Suffering

“It may be called the Master Passion—the hunger for Self-Approval.”

Mark Twain book What Is Man?

Source: What Is Man? (1906), Ch. 6

Passion

“We believe that societies and economies only advance as far as individuals are free to carry them forward. And just as freedom cannot exist when people are imprisoned for their political views, true opportunity cannot exist when people are imprisoned by sickness, or hunger, or darkness.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

2013, Cape Town University Address (June 2013)

People , Freedom

“The human being should be the absolute priority. It seems it is more important to reach the planet Mars than prevent 13 million Africans dying of hunger. Why would I want to know if there is water on Mars if we are polluting the water here on Earth, or doing nothing to avoid it? Priorities need to be redefined, but there is no chance of this, if we don't confront the need to know what democracy is.”

José Saramago (1922–2010) Portuguese writer and recipient of the 1998 Nobel Prize in Literature

Quoted in New African (IC Magazines Limited, 2003), p. 25.

Democracy , Water , Chance

“Welcome baby,
It's your turn to live,
They lie in wait for you, chicken pox, whooping cough, smallpox,
Malaria, TB, heart disease, cancer, and so on.
Unemployment, hunger, and so on.
Train wrecks, bus accidents, plane crashes, work accidents,
Earthquakes, floods, droughts, and so on.
Heartbreak, alcoholism, and so on.
Nightsticks, prison doors, and so on.
They lie in wait for you, the atom bomb, and so on.
Welcome baby,
It's your turn to live.
They lie in wait for you, socialism, communism, and so on.”

Nâzım Hikmet (1902–1963) Turkish poet

From Welcome (10 September 1961)

Alcohol , Lie , Disease , Communication

“You called and cried out loud and shattered my deafness. You were radiant and resplendent, you put to flight my blindness. You were fragrant, and I drew in my breath and now pant after you. I tasted you, and I feel but hunger and thirst for you. You touched me, and I am set on fire to attain the peace which is yours.”

Aurelius Augustinus book Confessions

Confessions (c. 397)

Peace , Feeling

“Those truly natural wants, which reason alone, without some other help, is not able to fence against, nor keep from disturbing us. The pains of sickness and hurts, hunger, thirst, and cold, want of sleep and rest or relaxation of the part weary'd with labour, are what all men feel and the best dispos'd minds cannot but be sensible of their uneasiness; and therefore ought, by fit applications, to seek their removal, though not with impatience, or over great haste, upon the first approaches of them, where delay does not threaten some irreparable harm. The pains that come from the necessities of nature, are monitors to us to beware of greater mischiefs, which they are the forerunner of; and therefore they must not be wholly neglected, and strain'd too far. But yet the more children can be inur'd to hardships of this kind, by a wise care to make them stronger in body and mind, the better it will be for them.”

John Locke book Some Thoughts Concerning Education

Sec. 107
Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693)

Men , Pain , Children , Feeling

“Why, it was like reading about France and the French, before the ever memorable and blessed Revolution, which swept a thousand years of such villany away in one swift tidal-wave of blood -- one: a settlement of that hoary debt in the proportion of half a drop of blood for each hogshead of it that had been pressed by slow tortures out of that people in the weary stretch of ten centuries of wrong and shame and misery the like of which was not to be mated but in hell. There were two "Reigns of Terror," if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the "horrors" of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break? What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror -- that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.”

Mark Twain book A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court

Ch. 13 http://www.literature.org/authors/twain-mark/connecticut/chapter-13.html
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889)

Death , People , Hell , Passion

“Hunger, prolonged, is temporary madness! The brain is at work without its required food, and the most fantastic notions fill the mind. Hitherto I had never known what hunger really meant. I was likely to understand it now.”

Jules Verne book A Journey to the Center of the Earth

These sentences, from an early translation of the book (Griffith and Farran, 1871), have no source in the original French text.
Source: Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864), Ch. XLI: The great explosion and the rush down below

Food , Understanding , Madness

“Imagine no possessions,
I wonder if you can;
No need for greed or hunger –
A brotherhood of man;
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world…”

John Lennon (1940–1980) English singer and songwriter

You may say I'm a dreamer,
But I'm not the only one;
I hope some day you will join us,
And the world will live as one.
"Imagine" (song)
Lyrics, Imagine (1971 album)

People , World , Imagination

“And these were the dishes wherein to me, hunger-starven for thee, they served up the sun and the moon.”
Et illa erant fercula, in quibus mihi esurienti te inferebatur sol et luna.

Aurelius Augustinus book Confessions

III, 6
Confessions (c. 397)

Sun

“Biting poverty and cruel Cupid are my foes. Hunger I can endure; love I cannot.”
Paupertas me saeva domat dirusque Cupido:<br/>sed toleranda fames, non tolerandus amor.

Claudian (370–404) Roman Latin poet

Paupertas me saeva domat dirusque Cupido:
sed toleranda fames, non tolerandus amor.
Epigram XV http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/L/Roman/Texts/Claudian/Carmina_Minora*/omnia.html#XV

Love

“What they teach in these acting schools is incredible, hair-raising crap. The Actors Studio in America is supposed to be the worst. There the students learn how to be natural - that is, they flop around, pick their noses, scratch their balls. This bullshit is known as "method acting." How can you "teach" someone to be an actor? How can you teach someone how and what to feel and how to express it? How can someone teach me how to laugh or cry? How to be glad and how to be sad? What pain is, or despair or happiness? What poverty and hunger are? What hate and love are? What desire is, and fulfillment? No, I don't want to waste my time with these arrogant morons.”

Klaus Kinski (1926–1991) German actor

Source: Kinski Uncut : The Autobiography of Klaus Kinski (1996), p. 59

Love , Pain , Hate , Sadness

“The hill-cat boasts some cunning of her own,
Some stealthy tricks to better beasts unknown
That quick with prey enough her hunger blunts
And feeds her fat while gaunt the lion hunts.”

Robert Browning book Sordello

Book the First
Sordello (1840)

Cats

“The hunger for peace is too great, the hour in history too late, for any government to mock men's hopes with mere words and promises and gestures. […] There is, before all peoples, a precarious chance to turn the black tide of events. If we failed to strive to seize this chance, the judgment of future ages will be harsh and just. If we strive but fail and the world remains armed against itself, it at least would need be divided no longer in its clear knowledge of who has condemned humankind to this fate.”

Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890–1969) American general and politician, 34th president of the United States (in office from 1953 to 1961)

1950s, The Chance for Peace (1953)

Men , Fate , People , Age

“That it must have been hunger alone, which first drove man to slay the animals and feed upon their flesh and blood; and that this compulsion was no mere consequence of his removal into colder climes … is proved by the patent fact that great nations with ample supplies of grain suffer nothing in strength or endurance even in colder regions through an almost exclusively vegetable diet, as is shewn by the eminent length of life of Russian peasants; while the Japanese, who know no other food than vegetables, are further renowned for their warlike valour and keenness of intellect. We may therefore call it quite an abnormality when hunger bred the thirst for blood … that thirst which history teaches us can never more be slaked, and fills its victims with a raging madness, not with courage. One can only account for it all by the human beast of prey having made itself monarch of the peaceful world, just as the ravening wild beast usurped dominion of the woods … And little as the savage animals have prospered, we see the sovereign human beast of prey decaying too. Owing to a nutriment against his nature, he falls sick with maladies that claim but him, attains no more his natural span of life or gentle death, but, plagued by pains and cares of body and soul unknown to any other species, he shuffles through an empty life to its ever fearful cutting short.”

Richard Wagner (1813–1883) German composer, conductor

Part III
Religion and Art (1880)

Life , Death , Pain , World

“My own guess is that it’s a myth fueled by the same hunger for superstitious verities that drives other religions.”

Dan Simmons book The Fall of Hyperion

Source: The Fall of Hyperion (1990), Chapter 11 (p. 91)

Religion

“People mistake L. Ron Hubbard and his Scientology. They see the apparency, and not the actuality. By design. Scientology does not work as stated; but as intended. As intended by its creator L Ron Hubbard. To keep the Doorway open. To remain in the realm of the Great Beast. To feed the hunger of the Will. His Will. When he emptied the purse of man and the heart of women; it seeks onward and outward. Appetite. Forever appetite. Scientology is the snare. The passion flower. the Cloak of Lights. The glow of power. A power always wanting. Always needing. The Will never satisfied.”

Ronald DeWolf (1934–1991) American critic of Scientology

The Telling of Me, by Me (1981)

Women , People , Flowers , Light

“This hunger for novelty — which makes sensuous love equally changeful and rapacious, which makes us seek the same emotion in other bodies which we cast off as fast as they fall — turns life into an infernal succession of disenchantments, spites and scorn; and it is chiefly that hunger for novelty which leaves us a prey to unrealizable hope and irrevocable regret. Those lovers who persist in remaining together execute themselves; the name of their common death, which at first was Absence, becomes Presence.”

Henri Barbusse (1873–1935) French novelist

Light (1919), Ch. XXIII - Face To Face

Love , Life , Death , Hope

“Your wonderment 'what I have against religion' reminds me of your recent Vagrant essay… To my mind, that essay misses one point altogether. Your "agnostic" has neglected to mention the very crux of all agnosticism—namely that the Judaeo-Christian mythology is NOT TRUE. I can see that in your philosophy truth per se has so small a place, that you can scarcely realise what it is that Galpin and I are insisting upon. In your mind, MAN is the centre of everything, and his exact conformation to certain regulations of conduct HOWEVER EFFECTED, the only problem in the universe. Your world (if you will pardon my saying so) is contracted. All the mental vigour and erudition of the ages fail to disturb your complacent endorsement of empirical doctrines and purely pragmatical notions, because you voluntarily limit your horizon—excluding certain facts, and certain undeniable mental tendencies of mankind. In your eyes, man is torn between only two influences; the degrading instincts of the savage, and the temperate impulses of the philanthropist. To you, men have but two types of emotion—lovers of the self and lovers of the race…. You are forgetting a human impulse which, despite its restriction to a relatively small number of men, has all through history proved itself as real and as vital as hunger—as potent as thirst or greed. I need not say that I refer to that simplest yet most exalted attribute of our species—the acute, persistent, unquenchable craving TO KNOW. Do you realise that to many men it makes a vast and profound difference whether or not the things about them are as they appear?… If TRUTH amounts to nothing, then we must regard the phantasma of our slumbers just as seriously as the events of our daily lives…. I recognise a distinction between dream life and real life, between appearances and actualities. I confess to an over-powering desire to know whether I am asleep or awake—whether the environment and laws which affect me are external and permanent, or the transitory products of my own brain. I admit that I am very much interested in the relation I bear to the things about me—the time relation, the space relation, and the causative relation. I desire to know approximately what my life is in terms of history—human, terrestrial, solar, and cosmical; what my magnitude may be in terms of extension,—terrestrial, solar, and cosmical; and above all, what may be my manner of linkage to the general system—in what way, through what agency, and to what extent, the obvious guiding forces of creation act upon me and govern my existence. And if there be any less obvious forces, I desire to know them and their relation to me as well.”

H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) American author

Letter to Maurice W. Moe (15 May 1918), in Selected Letters I, 1911-1924 edited by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, p. 60
Non-Fiction, Letters

Life , Men , Truth , Age

“Man is so constituted that health is a purely negative state. Hunger once satisfied, it is difficult for a man to imagine the horrors of starvation; they cannot be understood without being felt.”

Jules Verne book A Journey to the Center of the Earth

L’homme est ainsi fait, que sa santé est un effet purement négatif; une fois le besoin de manger satisfait, on se figure difficilement les horreurs de la faim; il faut les éprouver, pour les comprendre.
Source: Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864), Ch. XLII: Headlong speed upward through the horrors of darkness

Health , Imagination

“My priority is to establish this country as a poverty-free country, we have a long way to go – we have to do more. When I have been able to establish this country as a poverty-free country, a hunger-free country, a developed country, perhaps at that time, perhaps then I may say I am proud.”

Sheikh Hasina (1947) Prime Minister of Bangladesh

At the UN general assembly to launch the sustainable development goals (SDGs). https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2015/sep/25/sheikh-hasina-i-want-to-make-bangladesh-poverty-free-sustainable-development-goals (25 September 2015)

Way , Time , Country

“Do you believe then that the sciences would have arisen and grown up if the sorcerers, alchemists, astrologers and witches had not been their forerunners; those who, with their promisings and foreshadowings, had first to create a thirst, a hunger, and a taste for hidden and forbidden powers?”

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) German philosopher, poet, composer, cultural critic, and classical philologist

Variant translation: Do you believe then that the sciences would ever have arisen and become great if there had not beforehand been magicians, alchemists, astrologers and wizards, who thirsted and hungered after abscondite and forbidden powers?
Sec. 300
The Gay Science (1882)

Science

“For some moments there had been outlined within me the tragic shape of the cry which at last came forth. It was a sort of madness of sincerity and simplicity which seized me.
And I, unveiling my life to her, though it slid away by the side of hers, all my life, with its failings and its coarseness. I let her see me in my desires, in my hungers, in my entrails.”

Henri Barbusse (1873–1935) French novelist

Light (1919), Ch. XXIII - Face To Face

Life , Cry , Sincerity , Madness

“Regarding the plan to collect my writings in volumes, I am quite cool and not at all eager about it because, roused by a Saturnian hunger, I would rather see them all devoured. For I acknowledge none of them to be really a book of mine, except perhaps the one On the Bound Will and the Catechism.”

Martin Luther (1483–1546) seminal figure in Protestant Reformation

Letter to Wolfgang Capito (9 July 1537)

Books

“Anthroposophy is a path of knowledge, to guide the spiritual in the human being to the spiritual in the universe… Anthroposophists are those who experience, as an essential need of life, certain questions on the nature of the human being and the universe, just as one experiences hunger and thirst.”

Rudolf Steiner (1861–1925) Austrian esotericist

Anthroposophical Leading Thoughts (1924)

Life , Question , Nature , Knowledge

“It was the greatest contribution towards the whole of human race, made by China, is to prevent its 1.3 billion people from hunger.”

Xi Jinping (1953) General Secretary of the Communist Party of China and paramount leader of China

Statement during his visit to Mexico (11 February 2009) as quoted in "China's Xi named to oversee military, a step closer to presidency" http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/73173/20101019/china-xi-presidency.htm in International Business TImes (18 October 2010)
2000s

People

“The purchaser draws boundaries, fences himself in, and says, “This is mine; each one by himself, each one for himself.” Here, then, is a piece of land upon which, henceforth, no one has a right to step, save the proprietor and his friends; which can benefit nobody, save the proprietor and his servants. Let these sales multiply, and soon the people — who have been neither able nor willing to sell, and who have received none of the proceeds of the sale — will have nowhere to rest, no place of shelter, no ground to till. They will die of hunger at the proprietor’s door, on the edge of that property which was their birthright; and the proprietor, watching them die, will exclaim, “So perish idlers and vagrants!””

Pierre Joseph Proudhon (1809–1865) French politician, mutualist philosopher, economist, and socialist

Ch. III: "Labor as the Efficient Cause of the Domain of Property" http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/economics/proudhon/property/ch03.htm
What is Property? (1840)

People , Drawing

“It is not pornography that is obscene, it is hunger that is obscene.”

José Saramago (1922–2010) Portuguese writer and recipient of the 1998 Nobel Prize in Literature

Não é a pornografia que é obscena, é a fome que é obscena
Interview http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vuohB_arwRE&lr=1 Programa Jô Soares, 1997.

“There are some bored foreigners, with full stomachs, who have nothing better to do than point fingers at us… First, China doesn't export Revolution; second, China doesn't export hunger and poverty; third, China doesn't come and cause you headaches, what more is there to be said?”

Xi Jinping (1953) General Secretary of the Communist Party of China and paramount leader of China

As quoted in "China's Xi named to oversee military, a step closer to presidency" in International Business Times (18 October 2010).
2000s

“These rappers are like Hunger Games/One minute, they're mockin' Jay/Next minute, they get their style from Migos or they copy Drake”

Eminem (1972) American rapper and actor

"Fall"
2010s, Kamikaze (2018)

Game

“He that thinks diversion may not lie in hard and painful labour, forgets the early rising, hard riding, heat, cold and hunger of huntsmen, which is yet known to be the constant recreation of men of the greatest condition.”

John Locke book Some Thoughts Concerning Education

Sec. 206
Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693)

Men , Pain , Lie , Thinking

“Beauty is an ecstasy; it is as simple as hunger. There is really nothing to be said about it.”

W. Somerset Maugham (1874–1965) British playwright, novelist, short story writer

Source: Cakes and Ale: Or, The Skeleton in the Cupboard (1930), p. 140.
Context: Beauty is an ecstasy; it is as simple as hunger. There is really nothing to be said about it. It is like the perfume of a rose: you can smell it and that is all.

Beauty

“My whole past life I live again in memory, and, involuntarily, I ask myself: 'why have I lived - for what purpose was I born?'… A purpose there must have been, and, surely, mine was an exalted destiny, because I feel that within my soul are powers immeasurable… But I was not able to discover that destiny, I allowed myself to be carried away by the allurements of passions, inane and ignoble. From their crucible I issued hard and cold as iron, but gone for ever was the glow of noble aspirations - the fairest flower of life. And, from that time forth, how often have I not played the part of an axe in the hands of fate! Like an implement of punishment, I have fallen upon the head of doomed victims, often without malice, always without pity… To none has my love brought happiness, because I have never sacrificed anything for the sake of those I have loved: for myself alone I have loved - for my own pleasure. I have only satisfied the strange craving of my heart, greedily draining their feelings, their tenderness, their joys, their sufferings - and I have never been able to sate myself. I am like one who, spent with hunger, falls asleep in exhaustion and sees before him sumptuous viands and sparkling wines; he devours with rapture the aerial gifts of the imagination, and his pains seem somewhat assuaged. Let him but awake: the vision vanishes - twofold hunger and despair remain!
And tomorrow, it may be, I shall die!… And there will not be left on earth one being who has understood me completely. Some will consider me worse, others, better, than I have been in reality… Some will say: 'he was a good fellow'; others: 'a villain.”

Mikhail Lermontov book A Hero of Our Time

And both epithets will be false. After all this, is life worth the trouble? And yet we live - out of curiosity! We expect something new... How absurd, and yet how vexatious!
A Hero of Our Time (1840; rev. 1841)

Love , Life , Pain , Fate

“The principles of Western liberalism seem no longer to lend themselves to effective action. Deprived of the expressive power, we are awed by it, have a hunger for it, and are afraid of it.”

Saul Bellow (1915–2005) Canadian-born American writer

"Literary Notes on Khrushchev" (1961), p. 36
It All Adds Up (1994)
Context: The principles of Western liberalism seem no longer to lend themselves to effective action. Deprived of the expressive power, we are awed by it, have a hunger for it, and are afraid of it. Thus we praise the gray dignity of our soft-spoken leaders, but in our hearts we are suckers for passionate outbursts, even when those passionate outbursts are hypocritical and falsely motivated.

“God is day and night, winter and summer, war and peace, surfeit and hunger.”

Heraclitus (-535) pre-Socratic Greek philosopher

Fragment 67
Numbered fragments

God , War , Peace , Winter

“Conditions of misery, suffering, war, and war profiteering were the incentive and inspiration for my work. I was also motivated by the seeming incompetence of governments, the academic world, and a lack of solutions from scientists. Many fail as generalists because of their over-specialization on limited aspects of social problems. Scientists, politicians, and academicians see problems from inside the system they’re in, which is what’s responsible for the problems in the first place. I am disappointed with those who worry about terra-forming other planets while our own is still full of war, poverty, hunger, and environmental neglect.”

Jacque Fresco (1916–2017) American futurist and self-described social engineer

War , Suffering , Problem , Disappointment

“There is a hunger in the human heart for beauty; there is a longing in the human soul for harmony and for peace; there is an unceasing aspiration in the human mind for an understanding of the problems of the Universe; and all these qualities of heart and soul and mind are fundamentally one, arising out of that amazing spiritual fire which dwells in the inmost of the inmost of every human being, and which is a reflection in his human character of the Divine Flame which is fundamentally the Spiritual Man; and this flame is the core of his being.”

Gottfried de Purucker (1874–1942) Author, Theosophist

The Masters and the Path of Occultism (1939)

Peace , Soul , Understanding , Beauty

“Many people today see genes as a reason for aberrant behavior, but the major influences have been shown to be environmental... What is considered appropriate behavior today may be considered un-sane in the future...Better values, ideals, and behavior cannot be fully realized while there is still hunger, unemployment, deprivation, war, and poverty.”

Jacque Fresco (1916–2017) American futurist and self-described social engineer

Source: Designing the Future (2007), p. 19

War , Future , People , Behavior

“You love the thunder and you love the rain
You know your hunger like you know your name
I know you wonder how you ever came
To be a woman in love with a man in search of the flame”

Jackson Browne (1948) American singer-songwriter

You Love the Thunder https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_Love_the_Thunder (1977)

Love , Making love , Search

“What threatens democracy is hunger, it is misery, it is the disease of those who have no resources to face it. These are the evils that can threaten democracy, but never the people in the public square in the use of their legitimate and democratic rights.”

João Goulart (1918–1976) 24th President of Brazil

Source: João Goulart: Uma Biografia. Jorge Ferreira. 2011. Page 411. ISBN 978-85-200-1056-3

Democracy , People , Evil , Disease

“Rights are, then, the fruits of the law, and of the law alone. There are no rights without law—no rights contrary to the law—no rights anterior to the law. Before the existence of laws there may be reasons for wishing that there were laws—and doubtless such reasons cannot be wanting, and those of the strongest kind;—but a reason for wishing that we possessed a right, does not constitute a right. To confound the existence of a reason for wishing that we possessed a right, with the existence of the right itself, is to confound the existence of a want with the means of relieving it. It is the same as if one should say, everybody is subject to hunger, therefore everybody has something to eat.”

Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) British philosopher, jurist, and social reformer

Pannomial Fragments (c. 1831), quoted in The Works of Jeremy Bentham, Vol. III (1838), p. 221

Law

“Look, lady, we're not going to go all HUNGER GAMES on each other. Isn't going to happen.”

Rick Riordan book The Blood of Olympus

Variant: He forced his fists to unclench. "Look, lady, we're not going to go all Hunger Games on each other. Isn't going to happen.
Source: The Blood of Olympus

Game

“Ladies and gentlemen, let the Seventy-fourth Hunger Games begin!”

Suzanne Collins book Mockingjay

Claudius Templesmith, p. 147
The Hunger Games trilogy, The Hunger Games (2008)
Source: Mockingjay

Game

“I hunger for your sleek laugh and your hands the color of a furious harvest. I want to eat the sunbeams flaring in your beauty.”

Pablo Neruda (1904–1973) Chilean poet

Variant: I hunger for your sleek laugh,
your hands the color of a savage harvest,
hunger for the pale stones of your fingernails,
I want to eat your skin like a whole almond.
Source: The Poetry of Pablo Neruda

Beauty , Color

“He said “woman” in the same way I’d say “Mmmmm, yummy chocolate” after waking up from hunger pains and finding a Hershey bar in an empty refrigerator.”

Ilona Andrews American husband-and-wife novelist duo

Source: Magic Burns

Pain , Way

“Winning means fame and fortune. Losing means certain death. The Hunger Games have begun.”

Suzanne Collins The Hunger Games

Tagline on the back cover
Source: The Hunger Games trilogy, The Hunger Games (2008)

Death , Game

“I am not a person to say the words out loud / I think them strongly, or let them hunger from the page.”

Keri Hulme (1947) New Zealand writer

Thinking , Personality

“There's a taste in the air, sweet and vaguely antiseptic, that reminds him of his teenage years in these streets, and of a general state of longing, a hunger for life to begin that from this distance seems like happiness.”

Ian McEwan Saturday

Source: Saturday

Life , Happiness

“She worked in order to live, and presently fell in love, also in order to live, for the heart, too, has its hunger.”

Victor Hugo book Les Misérables

Source: Les Misérables

Love , Heart

“For me, Art is the restoration of order. It may discuss all sort of terrible things, but there must be satisfaction at the end. A little bit of hunger, but also satisfaction.”

Toni Morrison (1931–2019) American writer

Interview with Don Swaim (1987)

Art

“I can give you my loneliness, my darkness, the hunger of my heart, I am trying to bribe you with uncertainty, with danger, with defeat.”

Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator, and a key figure in Spanish language literature

Heart , Loneliness

“I've discovered over the years that the simplest explanation is almost always the right one; and that hunger of one kind or another - desire, by another name - is the source of almost every sorrow.”

Claire Messud (1966) American writer

Source: The Woman Upstairs

“Whether it was power they sought, or revenge, or love-well, those were all just different forms of hunger. The bigger the hole inside you, the more desperate you became to fill it.”

Jodi Picoult book The Storyteller

Source: The Storyteller

Love , Revenge

“Desire makes life happen. Makes it matter. Makes everything worth it. Desire is life. Hunger to see the next sunrise or sunset, to touch the one you love, to try again.

'Hell would be waking up and wanting nothing,' he agrees.”

Karen Marie Moning (1964) author

Source: Shadowfever

Love , Life , Hell

“There's something to be said for hunger: at least it lets you know you're still alive.”

Margaret Atwood book Oryx and Crake

Source: Oryx and Crake

“You can't brace yourself for famine if you've never known hunger.”

David Sedaris (1956) American author

“Maybe there is no better novel in the world than Denton Welch's In Youth Is Pleasure. Just holding it in my hands, so precious, so beyond gay, so deliciously subversive, is enough to make illiteracy a worse social crime than hunger.”

John Waters (1946) American filmmaker, actor, comedian and writer

Source: Role Models

Pleasure , Youth , World

“The journey is difficult, immense. We will travel as far as we can, but we cannot in one lifetime see all that we would like to see or to learn all that we hunger to know.”

Loren Eiseley (1907–1977) US philosopher (1907-1977)

Travel , Learning

“What fabrications they are, mothers. Scarecrows, wax dolls for us to stick pins into, crude diagrams. We deny them an existence of their own, we make them up to suit ourselves -- our own hungers, our own wishes, our own deficiencies.”

Margaret Atwood book The Blind Assassin

Source: The Blind Assassin

“What kind of scholar was I? Or was I a scholar at all? My ignorance was enormous. Beside it my knowledge was nothing. My hunger for learning, not so much to improve my lot as to understand my world, had led me to study and to thought. Reading without thinking is as nothing, for a book is less important for what it says than for what it makes you think.”

Louis L'Amour book The Walking Drum

Source: The Walking Drum (1984), Ch. 25

Books , World , Understanding , Knowledge

“A Witch is born out of the true hungers of her time,” she said. “I was born out of New York. The things that are most wrong here summoned me. ("Drink Entire: Against The Madness Of Crowds")”

Ray Bradbury book Long After Midnight

Source: Long After Midnight

Drink , Time , Madness

“Universal education has created an immense class of what I may call the New Stupid, hungering for certainty yet unable to find it in the traditional myths and their rationalizations.”

Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) English writer

Stupidity , Education , Universe

“How can you frighten a man whose hunger is not only in his own cramped stomach but in the wretched bellies of his children? You can't scare him--he has known a fear beyond every other.”

John Steinbeck book The Grapes of Wrath

Source: The Grapes of Wrath

Children , Fear

“So therefore I dedicate myself, to my art, my sleep, my dreams, my labors, my suffrances, my loneliness, my unique madness, my endless absorption and hunger because I cannot dedicate myself to any fellow being.”

Jack Kerouac (1922–1969) American writer

Dreams , Art , Sleep , Loneliness

“When your own life is threatened, your sense of empathy is blunted by a terrible, selfish hunger for survival.”

Yann Martel book Life of Pi

Source: Life of Pi

Life , Sense , Selfishness

“If you take responsibility for yourself you will develop a hunger to accomplish your dreams.”

Les Brown (1945) American politician

Dreams

“It's not the cheating. It's the hunger for an alternative. The refusal to accept unhappiness.”

Tom Perrotta book Little Children

Source: Little Children

Cheating

“If our impulses were confined to hunger, thirst, and desire, we might be nearly free; but now we are moved by every wind that blows and a chance word or scene that that word may convey to us.”

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus

Source: Frankenstein

Chance

“My name is Katniss Everdeen. I am seventeen years old. My home is District 12. I was in the Hunger Games. I escaped. The Capitol hates me……..”

Suzanne Collins book Mockingjay

Katniss (pp. 8)
Source: The Hunger Games trilogy, Mockingjay (2010)
Context: My Name is Katniss Everdeen. I am seventeen years old. My home is District 12. I was in The Hunger Games. I escaped. The Capitol hates me. Peeta was taken prisoner. He is thought to be dead. Most likely he is dead. It is probably best if he is dead...

Hate , Home , Game