Longing To Belong Quotes & Sayings

The older I get, the more I feel like an exile, that I don't belong here. And I don't. I was made for heaven, and my heart is longing for it. — John Corapi

In the material world below, she always felt lonely and there was nobody to understand her true nature. She always knew that she didn't belong to the world of humans. She thought they were all possessive and has limited ways of thinking. She always kept longing for her true home and could never find it. — Stevan V. Nikolic

Forget the fake syrupy stuff. Melt down a bar of chocolate, mix it into some warmed up whipping cream, and put it on top of ice cream. Add some sprinkles, and you've got a delicious treat. — Blake Lively

Our hunger to belong is the longing to find a bridge across the distance from isolation to intimacy. Every one longs for intimacy and dreams of a nest of belonging in which one is embraced, seen, and loved. Something within each of us cries out for belonging. We can have all the world has to offer in terms of status, achievement, and possessions. Yet without a sense of belonging it all seems empty and pointless. — John O'Donohue

One reason for the low correlations between individuals' circumstances and their satisfaction with life is that both experienced happiness and life satisfaction are largely determined by the genetics of temperament. A disposition for well-being is as heritable as height or intelligence, as demonstrated by studies of twins separated at birth. — Daniel Kahneman

Literature is a vast bazaar where customers come to purchase everything except mirrors. — James Branch Cabell

I am sick to death of cleverness. Everybody is clever nowadays. — Oscar Wilde

The Lebanese banking system helps Iran, Syria & Hezbollah evade sanctions. — Ziad K. Abdelnour

We fell silent and all joking ceased. We gazed mutely into each other's eyes and an intense longing for the fullest avowal of the truth forced us to a confession, requiring no words whatever, or the incommensurable misfortune that weighed upon us. With tears and sobs we sealed a vow to belong to each other alone. — Frederic Chopin

Back when I had fresh, unwounded eyes. Before I realized the selfishness and deceit that we, as adults, hold. The ugly truths of life that pull apart love and make our relationships obligation-centers that carry us from year to year, transition to transition. — Alessandra Torre

Our bodies know that they belong; it is our minds that make our lives so homeless. Guided by longing, belonging is the wisdom of rhythm. When we are in rhythm with our own nature, things flow and balance naturally. Every fragment does not have to be relocated, reordered; things cohere and fit according to their deeper impulse and instinct. Our modern hunger to belong is particularly intense. An increasing majority of people feel no belonging. We have fallen out of rhythm with life. The art of belonging is the recovery of the wisdom of rhythm. — John O'Donohue

One of the deepest of all human longings is the longing to belong, to be a part of things, to be invited in. We want to be part of the fellowship. Where did that come from? — John Eldredge

Here's a habit I never thought I'd develop: I gravitate to anything online that's marked 'most popular' or 'most e-mailed.' And I hate myself a little bit every time I do. — Susan Orlean

Perhaps your hunger to belong is always active and intense because you belonged so totally before you came here. This hunger to belong is the echo and reverberation of your invisible heritage. You are from somewhere else, where you were known, embraced and sheltered. This is also the secret root from which all longing grows. Something in you knows, perhaps remembers, that eternal belonging liberates longing into its surest and most potent creativity. This is why your longing is often wiser than your conventional sense of appropriateness, safety and truth ... Your longing desires to take you towards the absolute realization of all the possibilities that sleep in the clay of your heart; it knows your eternal potential, and it will not rest until it is awakened. — John O'Donohue

Can I be a modern girl, if I acknowledge such thoughts? I must be modern; I live now. But like everybody else, as Hollier says, I live in a muddle of eras, and some of my ideas belong to today, and some to an ancient past, and some to periods of time that seem more relevant to my parents than to me. If I could sort them and control them I might know better where I stand, but when I most want to be contemporary the Past keeps pushing in, and when I long for the Past (like when I wish Tadeusz had not died, and were with me now to guide and explain and help me to find where I belong in life) the Present cannot be pushed away. When I hear girls I know longing to be what they call liberated, and when I hear others rejoicing in what they think of as liberation, I feel a fool, because I simply do not know where I stand. — Robertson Davies

The longing to belong and to be prized by one's peers permeates childhood and adolescence and can be compelling and anxiety provoking at any time in life, as the common dread of cocktail parties in adulthood attests. This need -- as old and as potent as erotic desire -- is a fundamental part of being human; according to object relations theory, we become ourselves by being recognized and loved by others. — Jeanne Safer

Love is a longing to belong, to be beloved. — Debasish Mridha

I've always tried to make a home for myself, but I have not felt at home in myself. I've worked hard at being the hero of my own life. But every time I checked the register of displaced persons, I was still on it. I didn't know how to belong. Longing? Yes. Belonging? No. — Jeanette Winterson

Mother Florence had once told her that jealousy was the worst of all faults because it prevented a person from being who they were born to be. — Christopher Pike

I always had this put-together family, and I always identified as the outsider. And that's a position where I feel most comfortable, and yet I feel an incredible longing to belong. That is really a strong feeling from my childhood - a desire to be part of a group. — Lily King

But we're all looking for the place we belong. And what is home, anyway, but what we cobble together out of our changing selves? Maybe there isn't any it, as my friend said, only the longing — Abigail Thomas

The good, the admirable reader identifies himself not with the boy or the girl in the book, but with the mind that conceived and composed that book. — Vladimir Nabokov

Once outside the magic circle the writers became their lonely selves, pondering on poems, observing their fellow men ruthlessly, putting people they knew into novels; no wonder they were without friends. — Barbara Pym

Great books write themselves, only bad books have to be written. — F Scott Fitzgerald

And a woman who held a babe against her bosom said, Speak to us of Children. And he said: Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself. They come through you but not from you, And though they are with you yet they belong not to you. You may give them your love but not your thoughts, For they have their own thoughts. You may house their bodies but not their souls, For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams. You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you. For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday. — Kahlil Gibran

Shrinking in a corner,
pressed into the wall;
do they know I'm present,
am I here at all?
Is there a written rule book,
that tells you how to be
all the right things to talk about
that everyone has but me?
Slowly I am withering
a flowered deprived of sun;
longing to belong to
somewhere or someone. — Lang Leav

One word was the method by which the state collected their information. They could reel in the informants and spread them out like tentacles, ready to sting in any direction. — F.C. Malby

The way I see it, religion, has done our family more harm than good. For me, faith has never been a source of comfort... For herself, Mela always missed having that sense of identity. She had a longing to belong... Long ago, we found that compromise. — Ralph Webster

Like they were puppets, and the puppeteer had sneezed. — Lee Child

My body has become
another country
and I feel like an unemployed
illegal alien
how will I survive
where I do not belong
I belong with you — Patrick Califia-Rice

The gospel has but a forced alliance with war. Its doctrine of human brotherhood would ring strangely between the opposed ranks. The bellowing speech of cartoon and the baptism of blood mock its liturgies and sacraments. Its gentle beatitudes would hardly serve as mottoes for defiant banners, nor its list of graces as names for ships-of-the-line. — Edwin Hubbel Chapin

We come to this world with an abundance of hope, a deep desire to love, and a longing to belong. — Debasish Mridha

If you can learn to use your mind as well as your powder puff, you will become more truly beautiful. — Sophia Loren

Even religious people are vulnerable to this longing. Those who belong to communities of faith have acquired a certain patience with what is sometimes called organized religion. They have learned to forgive themselves. They do not expect their institutions to stand in for God, and they are happy to use inherited maps for some of life's journeys. They do not need to walk off every cliff all by themselves. Yet they too can harbor the sense that there is more to life that they are being shown. Where is the secret hidden? Who has the key to the treasure box of More? — Barbara Brown Taylor

The word longing comes from the same root as the word long in the sense of length in either time or space and also the word belong, so that in its full richness to long suggests to yearn for a long time for something that is a long way off and something that we feel we belong to and that belongs to us. The longing for home is so universal a form of longing that there is even a special word for it, which is of course homesickness, — Frederick Buechner

We [humans] are the only creatures who are in-between. We're of the earth, but don't belong to it, because we strain after the heavens; and yet the heavens aren't full in us. So this wonderful, restless, eternal longing in us has us always on a quest. — John O'Donohue

You are my universe! I am longing to belong! — Debasish Mridha

The heart of the matter: You should never belong fully to something that is outside yourself. It is very important to find a balance in your belonging. You should never belong totally to any cause or system. People frequently need to belong to an external system because they are afraid to belong to their own lives. If your soul is awakened, then you realize that this is the house of your real belonging. Your longing is safe there. — John O'Donohue

I think Khalil Gibran stated it perfectly in The Prophet: Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself. They come through you but not from you, and though they are with you yet they belong not to you. — Wayne W. Dyer