Best 306 quotes in «belonging quotes» category

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.

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?

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

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 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.

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.

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.

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 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.

Art is my cure to all this madness, sadness and loss of belonging in the world & through it I'll walk myself home.

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 seat at the table is desired. But I'll scream from the street if I need to.

As individuals and as leaders we need to embrace both emotional and strategic agility. The demands of our lives can create physical burnout and make us feel increasingly isolated and impoverished.

As if I already had some inkling of my own future fate, I was most moved by those of the people here who had no homeland, or even worse, had not just one but two or three, and privately still did not feel sure where they belonged.

As we apprentice ourselves to the way of nature, we begin to understand that all of life is in a continuous cycle of giving and receiving. It is the honouring of this cycle that makes us feel at home in ourselves and in relation to the rest of nature. In order to experience true belonging, we must not only acknowledge the gifts we are receiving, but also give our beauty away, no matter how it may be received by others.

As we become more aware of what it takes to move through the journey from where we are to where we are destined to be, the teaching stories that are within my story, our story, is a reminder to use your conscious and creative powers of imagination to choose which road(s) you will take.

Beautiful places are not just a joy for the moment, while you’re there. They will become homes for you, spaces of solace and comfort, where you can close your eyes and go to. Nothing you experience will ever go away. It belongs to you now. Just feel. Don’t be afraid to feel.

As with Dutchy and Carmine on the train, this little cluster of women has become a kind of family to me. Like an abandoned foal that nestles against cows in the barnyard, maybe I just need to feel the warmth of belonging. And if I'm not going to find that with the Byrnes, I will find it, however partial and illusory, with the women in the sewing room.

Being sure-footed is also about paying attention and maintaining the right vision, intention and attitude. You will always benefit from spending time in thought and prayer about where you’re headed and why it matters that you get there.

Being left out was a kind of freedom...

Because if you don't have someone to run out of town once in a while, how are you going to know you yourself belong there?

Belonging, after all, is a particular kind of relation, one that arises amidst subjective experiences of mutual connection.

Belonging is important for our growth to independence; even further, it is important for our growth to inner freedom and maturity. It is only through belonging that we can break out of the shell of individualism and self-centredness that both protects and isolates us.

Belonging has always been tough for me." "I can be your home," he said quietly. "Belong to me.

But in his heart, he wanted to be at Camp Half-Blood. The months he'd spent there with Piper and Leo had felt more satisfying, more right than all his years at Camp Jupiter. Besides, at Camp Half-Blood, there was at least a chance he might meet his father someday. The gods hardly ever stopped by Camp Jupiter to say hello.

Big cities comforted me: the cover, the chaos, the hollow sympathy of the architecture, the Tube lines snaking underground. London could swallow you up, in a good way. There were times when I'd been broken and being subsumed into a city had made me feel part of a whole again.

But I also knew that if he turned away from me at this moment, somehow I would survive that, and I would find a way to flourish like the yard that still bloomed and grew around my family home. I'm Sookie Stackhouse. I belong here.

But I’ve looked devil in the eye and I saw heaven; I felt safe I felt home And I wonder if he was coward enough to hide beneath his demons Or I was too blind too blind for love that I did sing all my angels to sleep….

But most of those to whom Ender's Game feels most important are those who, like me, feel themselves to be perpetually outside their most beloved communities, never able to come inside and feel confident of belonging.

By refreshing our sense of belonging in the world, we widen the web of relationships that nourishes us and protects us from burnout.

But what is identity really? What is it to ‘belong’ when we cast ourselves in the mold of a social group? I ask this, in spite of my implicit allegiance to one; yet, it is a worthwhile question. I mean, really, what does it even mean to share a commonality of blood or language or religion or heritage or context or economy or trade—and what value does this sharing of common traits, values and experiences truly have when there exists already a larger model of connection and commonality enveloping these disparate identities whole...? Do we pout at our inadequacies in the face of a “something” that is slightly more heterogeneous in its model of belonging? Sometimes, we simply must let go and chalk up all these movements to an inveterate (and arbitrary) sense of pride.

By committing to continuous growth, you will achieve not just a good result but also an extraordinary one.

Celui qui n'appartient à aucun lieu spécifique ne peut, en réalité, retourner nulle part.

Coming back to Karachi is like stepping into the sea again after months on land. How easily you float, how peaceful is the sense of being borne along, and how familiar the sound of the water lapping against your limbs.

Charles says that he does not care what sort of Jane I am so long as I am his Jane; Sardar says that he does not care what sort of Jane I am so long as I am my own Jane; Sahjara says that she does not care what sort of Jane I am so long as she is my Sahjara. Thus I am daily three Janes, and so the luckiest of all.

Det var en uppväxt av brist. Inte en materiell sådan, där hade vi så vi klarade oss, utan en identitetsmässig. Vi var inga. Våra föräldrar var inga. Våra förfäder hade betytt noll och intet för den svenska historien. [...] Vi bröt på finska utan att vara finnar, vi bröt på svenska utan att vara svenskar. Vi var ingenting.

Deep down in my heart I know How much it’s hard for me to belong Either to someone Or to somewhere. Because it has always been there in my heart; the desire to make a world of my own out of everyone I meet or everyplace I go. And maybe that’s why it has never worked out for me to belong To any place or to any other person in the whole world But myself …

Don't belong; be.

Don't strive to belong, Parvin. Your effort is much better placed elsewhere.

Don’t ever forget why you’re doing what you’re doing. It provides the fuel that keeps you ­moving forward.

Focusing on each and every step you take on any of life’s treks reveals the essence of the work that is yours to do.

Especially at a time when one's life was new, roots helped.

Even more essential, however, is the identification of the individuals in the masses with the "führer." The more helpless the "mass-individual" has become, owing to his upbringing, the more pronounced is his identification with the führer, and the more the childish need for protection is disguised in the form of a feeling at one with the führer. This inclination to identify is the psychological basis of national narcissism, i.e., of the self-confidence that individual man derives from the "greatness of the nation." The reactionary lower middle-class man perceives himself in the führer, in the authoritarian state. On the basis of this identification he feels himself to be a defender of the "national heritage," of the "nation," which does not prevent him, likewise on the basis of this identification, from simultaneously despising "the masses" and confronting them as an individual. The wretchedness of his material and sexual situation is so overshadowed by the exalting idea of belonging to a master race and having a brilliant führer that, as time goes on, he ceases to realize how completely he has sunk to a position of insignificant, blind allegiance. The worker who is conscious of his skills—he, in short, who has rid himself of his submissive structure, who identifies with his work and not with the führer, with the international working masses and not with the national homeland—represents the opposite of this. He feels himself to be a leader, not on the basis of his identification with the führer, but on the basis of his consciousness of performing work that is vitally necessary for society's existence.

Even though an entire journey still stretched out before us, the moment we actually faced that wall was the only moment that mattered. The commitment and effort we needed called for total focus and concentration. We believed in our capacity to take the next step, and then the next step. We trusted our guides, our preparation and, ultimately, ourselves. This fueled our forward momentum and, our ultimate success.

Feeling rooted in the earth is soothing to the body, and it is our connection to the earth that gives us our most basic sense of belonging, home, resilience, and safety.

Everyone had a place. Everyone fit. Everyone belonged. Everyone but Anna Mae.