It seems to me we can never give up longing and wishing while we are still alive. There are certain things we feel to be beautiful and good, and we must hunger for them.

The speaker frames desire not as a childish weakness to be outgrown but as a condition of being alive. Longing and wishing persist because human consciousness continually measures the present against imagined goods—beauty, moral worth, love, or a fuller life. The metaphor of “hunger” suggests that aspiration is both painful and necessary: it can ache, yet it also testifies to vitality and to an ethical imagination capable of recognizing “the beautiful and good.” In Eliot’s moral psychology, such yearning can be a spur toward sympathy and self-improvement, even when fulfillment is partial or impossible; to lose it entirely would be a kind of spiritual death.