Best 306 quotes in «belonging quotes» category

Yet there are moments when I feel a continent apart, when their belonging seems easy and unforced and my own is only pantomime.

Yet when she'd opened her mouth to speak, all that had come out had been a string of lies. Every single one of them had been told to protect the changelings, to protect Lucas. They'd come from a hidden part of her she'd never before seen, a bright, hard knot of fierce loyalty and utter determination. That part wouldn't let her do anything to hurt the panther who'd kissed her and smashed the glass walls of her existence into a million slivers. It was then she'd realized that, for the first time in her life, she wanted something else even more than she wanted to belong. If only for a moment, if only for a second, she wanted to be loved.

You are my home; it is in your loving gaze that I find the comfort, acceptance, and the sense of belonging.

Your attitude is most empowered when you’re ­determined to transcend, to climb beyond, whatever walls you perceive to be in your way.

You know how it is when you arrive in a new place and feel like you don't belong there? That hesitation to recon with a new geography. That knowledge that this place is not mine, these ways of talking are not mine, these silences are not mine, this etiquette is not mine.So many new things to absorb. And the place also takes a little time to accept the new person. Often you have to meet the place on its own terms. Sometimes you have to work hard to earn your little corner in it. Till that place become yours, till you find your own equilibrium, there will be a gap between you and the place.

You make me feel at home in my own skin, and that is one of the greatest gifts anyone has ever given me.

You mean,' Captain Penderton said, 'that any fulfilment obtained at the expense of normalcy is wrong, and should not be allowed to bring happiness. In short, it is better, because it is morally honourable, for the square peg to keep scraping around the round hole rather than to discover and use the unorthodox square that would fit?'…'I don't agree

Your ability to take on monumental tasks is the result of having brought the proper tools to do so.

You belong in the library, as much as any book.

You belong to the world. Don’t be afraid to be a part of it.

You don’t belong only to yourself, you know. I doubt there is a single person in this world that belongs only to himself. When someone makes a connection...there is always something shared. And so people will never be completely free. It’s that which brings out the fun...and sadness...and love.

You have to understand that only the very worst end up here: the ones whose anger made them kill, and who felt no sorrow or guilt after the act; those so obsessed with themselves that they turned their backs on the sufferings of others, and left them in pain; those whose greed meant that others starved and died. Such souls belong here, because they would find no peace elsewhere. In this place, they are understood. In this place, their faults have meaning. In this place, they belong.

You're yet to reach the stage of 'love' if you don't feel a sense of pride in belonging to them.

Your level of belonging, in fact, can never be greater than your level of self-acceptance.

Among the gifts of serving others, then, is that we ourselves find our place of belonging.

You will always be one of us.

American individualism, much celebrated and cherished, has developed without its essential corrective, which is belonging.

Believing that you are unworthy of love and belonging or that who you are authentically is a sin or is wrong, is deadly.

My actions are my only true belongings. I cannot escape the consequences of my actions. My actions are the ground on which I stand.

Business is about belonging which means inclusion is the new black.

... divine love is not something belonging to God: it is God Himself.

It was my life — like all lives, mysterious and irrevocable and sacred. So very close, so very present, so very belonging to me. How wild it was, to let it be.

I've always felt that your belongings have never been on a level with you.

mine, adj. Belonging to me if I can hold or seize it.

Now I have no caste, no creed, I am no more what I am!

Perhaps one of the greatest rewards of meditation and prayer is the sense of belonging that comes to us.

Resolve to treat the things in your possession as belonging to others.

She would do anything, anything to belong to his son after a lifetime of belonging to no one at all.

Stop going to church everywhere and start belonging to church somewhere.

The climate is a common good, belonging to all and meant for all.

The greatest reverses of fortune are the most easily borne from a sort of dignity belonging to them.

Those who bless and serve life find a place of belonging and strength, a refuge.

They don't like the thought of someone else making demands on the person whom they see as belonging entirely to them.

Tomorrow belongs to those of us who conceive of it as belonging to everyone; who lend the best of ourselves to it, and with joy.

We will live with racism for ever. But senses of self, senses of belonging, senses of us and of others? Those are up for grabs.

Adoption is outside. You act out what it feels like to be the one who doesn't belong. And you act it out by trying to do to others what has been done to you. It is impossible to believe anyone loves you for yourself. I never believed that my parents loved me. I tried to love them but it didn't work. It has taken me a long time to learn how to love - both the giving and the receiving. I have written about love obsessively, forensically, and I know/knew it as the highest value. I loved God of course, in the early days, and God loved me. That was something. And I loved animals and nature. And poetry. People were the problem. How do you love another person? How do you trust another person to love you? I had no idea. I thought that love was loss. Why is the measure of love loss?

When you get to a place where you understand that love and belonging, your worthiness, is a birthright and not something you have to earn, anything is possible.

You cannot change any society unless you take responsibility for it, unless you see yourself as belonging to it and responsible for changing it.

8 second hug: Yes, eight seconds is a long time, and no, I am not recommending giving everyone an eight second hug. The shell we put up or mask we hide behind is made up of what we think logically think will keep us emotionally safe. Intuition is not fooled by shells or masks, intuition which is non-verbal communication bypasses whatever façade we put up, so that hearts can connect. This makes us feel vulnerable, because we can’t hide out hopes and fears from being seen from other people’s intuition. We may not remember the last time we felt an overwhelming feeling of belonging, but likely it was when we were the most vulnerable; like being held as a newly born infant, not aware that we were naked, and nothing we could do about it even if we did know, being held tightly in someone’s arms who completely loved us. It may not have been a parent or grandparent holding the newborn us, but if it wasn’t, for sure it was the nurse there at the delivery, responding to our cry to be held. We resist the one thing that allows someone into our life—vulnerability, by cutting off the intuitions communication which is non-verbal. We often avoid eye contact, avoid letting people see us cry, and avoid allowing ourselves to be held. I wish I had known earlier in life, what C.S. Lewis put so well in his book The Four Loves, “There is no safe investment. To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.” We live in a world of alphas, where we all want to prove we are worthy to be held by proving we can hold ourselves. When we hug what is said intuitively is, “I will hold your pieces together so you don’t have to worry about falling apart. Take a rest in my arms for a moment and remember that you are loved.” When we hug someone, at about eight seconds on average there is a deeper breath in and then an exhale as our body actually relaxes. You can definitely feel it, we are rigid, and then we melt. Don’t count while you are hugging, but if it is longer than about eight seconds before the other person relaxes, then they are really stressed out, and scared everything will crumble if they relax. If it is less than about five seconds, that means something else, not something consistent enough to be able to diagnose similar to taking longer to relax. You’ll just actually have to communicate and figure it out with the person. The non-verbal communication of a hug or eye contact should precede the verbal communication of words. I would venture a bet that most marriages struggling don’t meet each other after work with at least an eight second hug before they ask how their day was. We shouldn’t expect words to be able to describe emotions, especially when we can just look someone in the eyes and then hug them and feel their emotion for ourselves. The part of hugging that is the best, is after we relax and allow ourselves to be loved, and so if our hugs with those we really love aren’t at least eight seconds, we are totally missing out.

A few moments into the ride, I saw Reynaldo's figure down the road, walking erectly, holding something. Seeing him there, amid the banana trees and huts and roadside stands with petrol in Coke bottles, I felt a distinct envy: he belonged here, in this place. He strode with a correctness and security I knew I would never feel in this country. Which was fine. Displacement, it was a valid way to live.

After all, what are any of us after but the conviction of belonging?

After walking up and down an endless number of hills on the first day, very quickly my master teacher reminded me of this: Each person’s mountain has unexpected terrain that must be experienced as it is discovered and unfolds. Create the vision, set the goals, and then we each may have to adjust and redesign around what shows up in the middle of these plans.

All of one’s life is a struggle towards that; the narrow path between freedom and belonging. I have sometimes sacrificed freedom in order to belong, but more often I have given up all hope of belonging.

All of us believe you belong here,” I’d said to the Elizabeth Garrett Anderson girls as they sat, many of them looking a little awestruck, in the Gothic old-world dining hall at Oxford, surrounded by university professors and students who’d come out for the day to mentor them. I said something similar anytime we had kids visit the White House—teens we invited from the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation; children from local schools who showed up to work in the garden; high schoolers who came for our career days and workshops in fashion, music, and poetry; even kids I only got to give a quick but emphatic hug to in a rope line. The message was always the same. You belong. You matter. I think highly of you. An economist from a British university would later put out a study that looked at the test performances of Elizabeth Garrett Anderson students, finding that their overall scores jumped significantly after I’d started connecting with them—the equivalent of moving from a C average to an A. Any credit for improvement really belonged to the girls, their teachers, and the daily work they did together, but it also affirmed the idea that kids will invest more when they feel they’re being invested in. I understood that there was power in showing children my regard.

As far back as I can remember, there has always been a place to which I belonged with a certainty that nothing has been able to take from me. When I say place, that means less a geographical locality and more a group of people with whom I am connected and to whom I belong.

A mixture, before the English, of irritation and bafflement, of having this same language, same past, so many same things, and yet not belonging to them any more. Being worse than rootless... speciesless.

And as if he had read her thoughts, the old man murmured, 'What a blessing it is to die in your own bed, under your own roof, with your family surrounding you, full of the knowledge that you have lived as thoroughly as you wanted to.

And I decided it really was true after all. You only really need two people to believe in the same thing, to feel as though you just might belong.

Andrej thought about it - the notion that the world was riddled with holes where certain people and animals were meant to be, but weren’t.

And we kissed again. It was a warm, indescribably lovely feeling. But it was more than just physical. It was a dialogue between two young people with high ideals and a Big Plan. It was about belonging, secrets, partnership, commitment.