Derrick Jensen Quotes

Every promise of the soul has innumerable fulfillments; each of its joys ripens into a new want.

Man cannot live without joy; therefore when he is deprived of true spiritual joys it is necessary that he become addicted to carnal pleasures.

The need for love and intimacy is a fundamental human need, as primal as the need for food, water, and air.

We all have the need to feel special.

Everybody needs love. Everyone deserves it.

Human need is really a great spiritual vacuum which God seeks to fill... With one hand in the hand of a fellow man in need and the other in the hand of Christ, He could get across the vacuum.

A tear is enough water to float a desire to God.

We can't help being thirsty, moving toward the voice of water.

So many religions are there because so many people are unhappy. A happy person needs no religion; a happy person needs no temple, no church - because for a happy person the whole universe is a temple, the whole existence is a church. The happy person has nothing like religious activity because his whole life is religious.

The soul has greater need of the ideal than of the real

Access to safe water is a fundamental human need and therefore a basic human right.

We all have a hungry heart, and one of the things we hunger for is happiness.

He is bread to the hungry, water to the thirsty, a garment to the naked, healing to the wounded; and whatever a soul can desire is found in Him.

Nothing can take the place of a real hunger for souls, or make up for the lack of it.

"Love is a luxury." "No. Love is an element." An element. Like air to breathe, earth to stand on.

Is it perhaps the one necessity of love, that it be needed? And the one great human tragedy that it so rarely is?

Every need got an ego to feed.

There is in the soul a taste for the good, just as there is in the body an appetite for enjoyment.

What brings a real and lasting joy is our relationships with God, and our love for His other children He has put in our lives. It's people; friends and family that fulfil us. All else, fame, popularity, beauty, is so fleeting.

There are songs and melody that make you really happy. And there are spiritual gifts that you have - giving these gifts away sometimes gives you that feeling of inspiration. These seconds of awareness make you realize that any second can be your favorite one, and it really is up to you.

People are not hungry just for bread, they are hungry for love.

The need of the immaterial is the most deeply rooted of all needs. One must have bread; but before bread, one must have the ideal.

There was once in man a true happiness of which there now remain to him only the mark and empty trace, which he in vain tries to fill from all his surroundings, seeking from things absent the help he does not obtain in things present.

People don't need love. What they need is success in one form or another. It can be love but it needn't be.

Happiness is a thing honored and perfect. This seems to be borne out by the fact that it is a first principle or starting-point, since all other things that all men do are done for its sake; and that which is the first principle and cause of things good we agree to be something honorable and divine.