Quotes about thirst

A collection of quotes on the topic of thirst, hunger, use, life.

Quotes about thirst

Tupac Shakur photo
Kurt Cobain photo

“Thank you, dear God
For putting me on this Earth
I feel very privileged
In debt for my thirst”

Kurt Cobain (1967–1994) American musician and artist

Downer
Song lyrics, Bleach (1989)

Alexis Karpouzos photo
Isaac Bashevis Singer photo
Giorgio Vasari photo
Karl Lagerfeld photo
Stefan Zweig photo
Max Planck photo
Jules Verne photo

“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.”

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

Prem Rawat photo

“This peace is not the absence of anything. Real peace is the presence of something beautiful. Both peace and the thirst for it have been in the heart of every human being in every century and every civilization.”

Prem Rawat (1957) controversial spiritual leader

Address to faculty, students and guests at Harvard University's Sanders Theater (August 2004)
2000s

Hakuin Ekaku photo
Al Capone photo
Nora Roberts photo
Shah Abdul Latif Bhittai photo
Aurelius Augustinus photo
John Locke photo
Vladimir Nabokov photo

“I hastened to quench a thirst that had been burning a hole in the mixed metaphor of my life ever since I had fondled a quite different Dolly thirteen years earlier.”

Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977) Russian-American novelist, lepidopterist, professor

Look at the Harlequins! (1974).

Bawa Muhaiyaddeen photo
Aleksandr Pushkin photo
C. N. R. Rao photo

“Never stop learning. The thirst to gain more knowledge should never come to an end.”

C. N. R. Rao (1934) Indian chemist

How I made it: CNR Rao, Scientist (2010)

Jean Jacques Rousseau photo

“The thirst after happiness is never extinguished in the heart of man.”

Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) Genevan philosopher

Source: Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1765-1770; published 1782), Books VIII-XII, IX

José Saramago photo

“The man changed position, turned his back on the wardrobe blocking the door and let his right arm slide down toward the side on which the dog is lying. A minute later, he was awake. He was thirsty. He turned on his bedside light, got up, shuffled his feet into the slippers which were, as always, providing a pillow for the dog's head, and went into the kitchen. Death followed him. The man filled a glass with water and drank it. At this point, the dog appeared, slaked his thirst in the water-dish next to the back door and then looked up at his master. I suppose you want to go out, said the cellist. He opened the door and waited until the animal came back. A little water remained in his glass. Death looked at it and made an effort to imagine what it must be like to feel thirsty, but failed. She would have been equally incapable of imagining it when she'd had to make people die of thirst in the desert, but at the time she hadn't even tried. The dog returned, wagging his tail. Let's go back to sleep, said the man. They went into the bedroom again, the dog turned around twice, then curled up into a ball. The man drew the sheet up to his neck, coughed twice and soon afterward was asleep again. Sitting in her corner, death was watching. Much later, the dog got up from the carpet and jumped onto the sofa. For the first time in her life, death knew what it felt like to have a dog on her lap.”

Source: Death with Interruptions (2005), p. 172

Richard Wagner photo

“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)

Stephenie Meyer photo
Nanak photo
Musa al-Kadhim photo

“The likeness of this world is as the water of the sea - however much a thirsty person drinks from it, his thirst increases so much so that the water kills him.”

Musa al-Kadhim (745–799) Seventh of the Twelve Imams and regarded by Sunnis as a renowned scholar

Majlisi, Bihārul Anwār, vol.78, p. 311.
General

H.P. Lovecraft photo

“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

Pope Francis photo
Thomas Paine photo
Friedrich Nietzsche photo
Friedrich Nietzsche photo

“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)

Pope Francis photo
Rudolf Steiner photo
Emil M. Cioran photo
Barack Obama photo
Barack Obama photo
Alfred, Lord Tennyson photo

“Ambition
Is like the sea wave, which the more you drink
The more you thirst—yea—drink too much, as men
Have done on rafts of wreck—it drives you mad.”

Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809–1892) British poet laureate

The Cup, Act i, Scene 3, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Abraham Lincoln photo

“Towering genius disdains a beaten path. It seeks regions hitherto unexplored. — It sees no distinction in adding story to story, upon the monuments of fame, erected to the memory of others. It denies that it is glory enough to serve under any chief. It scorns to tread in the footsteps of any predecessor, however illustrious. It thirsts and burns for distinction”

Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) 16th President of the United States

Often the portion of this passage on "Towering genius..." is quoted without any mention or acknowledgment that Lincoln was speaking of the need to sometimes hold the ambitions of such genius in check, when individuals aim at their own personal aggrandizement rather than the common good.
1830s, The Lyceum Address (1838)
Context: It is to deny, what the history of the world tells us is true, to suppose that men of ambition and talents will not continue to spring up amongst us. And, when they do, they will as naturally seek the gratification of their ruling passion, as others have so done before them. The question then, is, can that gratification be found in supporting and maintaining an edifice that has been erected by others? Most certainly it cannot. Many great and good men sufficiently qualified for any task they should undertake, may ever be found, whose ambition would inspire to nothing beyond a seat in Congress, a gubernatorial or a presidential chair; but such belong not to the family of the lion, or the tribe of the eagle. What! think you these places would satisfy an Alexander, a Caesar, or a Napoleon? — Never! Towering genius disdains a beaten path. It seeks regions hitherto unexplored. — It sees no distinction in adding story to story, upon the monuments of fame, erected to the memory of others. It denies that it is glory enough to serve under any chief. It scorns to tread in the footsteps of any predecessor, however illustrious. It thirsts and burns for distinction; and, if possible, it will have it, whether at the expense of emancipating slaves, or enslaving freemen. Is it unreasonable then to expect, that some man possessed of the loftiest genius, coupled with ambition sufficient to push it to its utmost stretch, will at some time, spring up among us? And when such a one does, it will require the people to be united with each other, attached to the government and laws, and generally intelligent, to successfully frustrate his designs.

“I do not wish to be a king; I am not anxious to be rich; I decline military command; I detest fornication; I am not impelled by an insatiable love of gain to go to sea; I do not contend for chaplets; I am free from a mad thirst for fame; I despise death; I am superior to every kind of disease; grief does not consume my soul.”

Tatian (120–180) Syrian writer

Original: (la) Regnare nolo: ditescere non libet: prae turam recuso, scortationem odi: navigare ob insatiabilem avaritiam non cupio: de coronis consequendis non dimico: liber sum ab insana gloria cupiditate: mortem contemno: guovis morbi genere superior sum: maror animum non peredit.
Source: Address to the Greeks, Chapter XI, as translated by J. E. Ryland

Michael Jackson photo
Pablo Neruda photo
Frederick Buechner photo

“Lust is the craving for salt of a man who is dying of thirst.”

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

Source: Wishful Thinking: A Theological ABC

Paramahansa Yogananda photo
Kakuzo Okakura photo
Jean Paul Sartre photo

“That’s what existence means: draining one’s own self dry without the sense of thirst.”

Jean Paul Sartre (1905–1980) French existentialist philosopher, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and …
Anne Morrow Lindbergh photo
Victor Hugo photo
Charles Baudelaire photo
Edward Gibbon photo

“… as long as mankind shall continue to bestow more liberal applause on their destroyers than their benefactors, the thirst of military glory will ever be the vice of the most exalted characters.”

Edward Gibbon (1737–1794) English historian and Member of Parliament

Source: The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire Volume I

Frithjof Schuon photo

“We live in an age of confusion and thirst in which the advantages of communication are greater than those of secrecy.”

Frithjof Schuon (1907–1998) Swiss philosopher

Source: Esoterism as Principle and as Way

Thomas Jefferson photo

“Pride costs us more than hunger, thirst, and cold.”

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) 3rd President of the United States of America
Charles Baudelaire photo
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley photo
Zora Neale Hurston photo
Nathaniel Hawthorne photo

“She poured out the liquid music of her voice to quench the thirst of his spirit.”

Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864) American novelist and short story writer (1804 – 1879)

"The Birthmark" from Mosses from an Old Manse (1846)

Robin Hobb photo
Gao Xingjian photo
Jean Rhys photo
Pablo Neruda photo
Martin Luther King, Jr. photo
Terry Goodkind photo
Stephen King photo

“I'm looking for someone
to quench my thirst-for all eternity"
-Luna Maxwell”

Ellen Schreiber (1967) American writer

Source: Vampireville

Alejandra Pizarnik photo
Ali Smith photo
Pablo Neruda photo
Ann-Marie MacDonald photo

“Hope is a gift. You can't choose to have it. To believe and yet to have no hope is to thirst beside a fountain.”

Variant: To believe and yet to have no hope is to thirst beside a fountain.
Source: Fall on Your Knees

Margaret Atwood photo

“Mathematics because of its nature and structure is peculiarly fitted for high school instruction [Gymnasiallehrfach]. Especially the higher mathematics, even if presented only in its elements, combines within itself all those qualities which are demanded of a secondary subject. It engages, it fructifies, it quickens, compels attention, is as circumspect as inventive, induces courage and self-confidence as well as modesty and submission to truth. It yields the essence and kernel of all things, is brief in form and overflows with its wealth of content. It discloses the depth and breadth of the law and spiritual element behind the surface of phenomena; it impels from point to point and carries within itself the incentive toward progress; it stimulates the artistic perception, good taste in judgment and execution, as well as the scientific comprehension of things. Mathematics, therefore, above all other subjects, makes the student lust after knowledge, fills him, as it were, with a longing to fathom the cause of things and to employ his own powers independently; it collects his mental forces and concentrates them on a single point and thus awakens the spirit of individual inquiry, self-confidence and the joy of doing; it fascinates because of the view-points which it offers and creates certainty and assurance, owing to the universal validity of its methods. Thus, both what he receives and what he himself contributes toward the proper conception and solution of a problem, combine to mature the student and to make him skillful, to lead him away from the surface of things and to exercise him in the perception of their essence. A student thus prepared thirsts after knowledge and is ready for the university and its sciences. Thus it appears, that higher mathematics is the best guide to philosophy and to the philosophic conception of the world (considered as a self-contained whole) and of one’s own being.”

Christian Heinrich von Dillmann (1829–1899) German educationist

Source: Die Mathematik die Fackelträgerin einer neuen Zeit (Stuttgart, 1889), p. 40.

Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford photo

“So I the pleasant grape have pulled from the vine,
And yet I languish in great thirst, while others drink the wine.”

Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford (1550–1604) English peer and courtier of the Elizabethan era

from Care and Disappointment, first published in Paradyse of Dainty Devices, 1576. Published by Grosart in Miscellanies of the Fuller Worthies' Library, Vol. IV (1872)
Poems

Colin Wilson photo
Philo photo
Harry Harrison photo
Frederick William Robertson photo
Matthew Arnold photo

“The devil makes work for idle thirsts. But given the choice between booze and cannabis, I go for ganja every time.”

Dennis Nilsen (1945–2018) British serial killer

As quoted in Exclusive: Dennis Nilsen: My Prison Life of Drink and Drugs http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/exclusive-dennis-nilsen-prison-life-555104, Mirror.co.uk (27 August, 2005)

Edwin Abbott Abbott photo
Albert Einstein photo
William Cowper photo

“Low ambition and the thirst of praise.”

William Cowper (1731–1800) (1731–1800) English poet and hymnodist

Source: Table Talk (1782), Line 591.

Kóbó Abe photo
Charles Baudelaire photo

“O wise among all Angels ordinate,
God foiled of glory, god betrayed by fate,
Satan, O pity my long wretchedness!
O Prince of Exile doomed to heinous wrong,
Who, vanquished, riseth ever stark and strong,
Satan, O pity my long wretchedness!
Thou knowest all, proud king of occult things,
Familiar healer of man's sufferings,
Satan, O pity my long wretchedness!
Thy love wakes thirst for Heaven in one and all:
Leper, pimp, outcast, fool and criminal,
Satan, O pity my long wretchedness!”

<p>Ô toi, le plus savant et le plus beau des Anges,
Dieu trahi par le sort et privé de louanges,</p><p>Ô Satan, prends pitié de ma longue misère!</p><p>Ô Prince de l'exil, à qui l'on a fait tort
Et qui, vaincu, toujours te redresses plus fort,</p><p>Ô Satan, prends pitié de ma longue misère!</p><p>Toi qui sais tout, grand roi des choses souterraines,
Guérisseur familier des angoisses humaines,</p><p>Ô Satan, prends pitié de ma longue misère!</p><p>Toi qui, même aux lépreux, aux parias maudits,
Enseignes par l'amour le goût du Paradis,</p><p>Ô Satan, prends pitié de ma longue misère!
"Les Litanies de Satan" [Litanies of Satan] http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Les_Litanies_de_Satan
Les fleurs du mal (Flowers of Evil) (1857)

Robert Williams Buchanan photo
Paul Cézanne photo
Báb photo
Alexander Bogdanov photo
Anton Chekhov photo

“The thirst for powerful sensations takes the upper hand both over fear and over compassion for the grief of others.”

Anton Chekhov (1860–1904) Russian dramatist, author and physician

An Evil Night (1886)

Muhammad photo

“A prostitute was forgiven by Allah, because, passing by a panting dog near a well and seeing that the dog was about to die of thirst, she took off her shoe, and tying it with her head-cover she drew out some water for it. So, Allah forgave her because of that.”

Muhammad (570–632) Arabian religious leader and the founder of Islam

Bukhari 4:538 http://www.sacred-texts.com/isl/bukhari/bh4/bh4_541.htm This is an extraordinary hadith, because following the Sunnah of Muhammad (peace be upon him), prostitutes can be extremely despised figures among most Muslims, yet it expresses the idea that even someone working in one of the most despised of professions, in showing mercy to an animal, can merit the forgiveness of Allah, and the wise.
Sunni Hadith

Philip Schaff photo