All 18 Uses of

yearn
in
Of Human Bondage

He would willingly have made the service more ornate than had been usual in the low-church parish of Blackstable, and in his secret soul he yearned for processions and lighted candles.†
Chpt 7-8

yearned = strongly desired

He was also a good deal in debt: it was difficult to live in London like a gentleman on three hundred a year; and his heart yearned for the Venice and Florence which John Ruskin had so magically described.†
Chpt 25-26

He yearned above all things for experience and felt himself ridiculous because at his age he had not enjoyed that which all fiction taught him was the most important thing in life; but he had the unfortunate gift of seeing things as they were, and the reality which was offered him differed too terribly from the ideal of his dreams.†
Chpt 29-30

Hayward's poetic allusions troubled his imagination, and his soul yearned for romance.†
Chpt 29-30

He began to think of Paris as before he had thought of London, but he had no fear of a second disillusion; he yearned for romance and beauty and love, and Paris seemed to offer them all.†
Chpt 37-38

My soul yearns for the love of chamber-maids and the conversation of bishops.'†
Chpt 45-46

yearns = strongly desires

He had thought of love as a rapture which seized one so that all the world seemed spring-like, he had looked forward to an ecstatic happiness; but this was not happiness; it was a hunger of the soul, it was a painful yearning, it was a bitter anguish, he had never known before.†
Chpt 57-58

yearning = strongly desiring; or a strong desire

But when all was said the important thing was to love rather than to be loved; and he yearned for Mildred with his whole soul.†
Chpt 69-70

Now he was seized with a desire to do horrible, sordid things; he wanted to roll himself in gutters; his whole being yearned for beastliness; he wanted to grovel.†
Chpt 77-78

He grew haggard in shut-in spaces, and the soul he knew not he possessed struggled like a sparrow held in the hand, with little frightened gasps and a quick palpitation of the heart: he yearned for the broad skies and the open, desolate places among which his childhood had been spent; and he walked off one day, without a word to anybody, between one lecture and another; and the next thing his friends heard was that he had thrown up medicine and was working on a farm.†
Chpt 79-80

I yearn for it; and when I drink it I savour every drop, and afterwards I feel my soul swimming in ineffable happiness.†
Chpt 81-82 *

yearn = strongly desire

It was not surprising that he felt a deep sympathy with the Greek who had devised a new technique to express the yearnings of his soul.†
Chpt 87-88

yearnings = strong desires

Life was passionate and manifold, and because it offered so much they felt a restless yearning for something more; because they were human they were unsatisfied; and they threw this eager vitality of theirs into a vehement striving after the ineffable.†
Chpt 87-88

yearning = strongly desiring; or a strong desire

But as he walked home something struck him; he stopped under a lamp-post and read the letter again; the handwriting had no longer the business-like firmness which had characterised it; it was larger and wavering: perhaps the illness had shaken him more than he was willing to confess, and he sought in that formal note to express a yearning to see the only relationhe had in the world.†
Chpt 107-108

Definition:

have a strong desire -- often for something difficult or impossible to have