Quotes & Sayings About Not Knowing Where You Belong

In modern life, people tend to think their bodies belong to them, that they can do anything they want to themselves. But your body is not only yours. Your body belongs to your ancestors, your parents, and future generations. It also belongs to society and to all the other living beings. The trees, the clouds, the soil, and every living thing brought about the presence of your body. We can eat with care, knowing we are caretakers of our bodies, rather than their owners. — Thich Nhat Hanh

I'm a Russian and all I know of Russia is what I've read. I yearn for the broad fields of golden corn and the forests of silver beech that I've read of in books and though I try and try, I can't see them with my mind's eye. I know Moscow from what I've seen of it at the cinema. I sometimes rack my brain to picture to myself a Russian village, the straggling village of log houses with their thatched roofs that you read about in Chekov, and it's no good, I know that what I see isn't that at all. I'm a Russian and I speak my native language worse than I speak English and French. When I read Tolstoi and Dostoievsky it is easier for me to read them in a translation. I'm just as much a foreigner to my own people as I am to the English and French. You who've got a home and a country, people who love you, people whose ways are your ways, whom you understand without knowing them - how can you tell what it is to belong nowhere? — W. Somerset Maugham

Embodiment begins with knowing yourself - who you are, what cultures you belong to, and what you want to create in the world. — Bruce Nussbaum

Our street corners keep secrets, and our road signs only suggest,
never deciding for us, never knowing if the destination to which they lead is where we truely belong. — Alex Gaskarth

Knowing it, you know the very heartbeat of existence. Knowing it, you have known all that is worth knowing, and you have achieved all that is worth achieving. It opens doors to all the mysteries of existence, to all the treasures of existence which belong to you. Outside you are simply a beggar. Even your greatest intellectuals are just playing with words. — Osho

I believe that man must learn to live without those consolations called religious, which is own intelligence must by now have told him belong to the childhood of the race. Philosophy can really give us nothing permanent to believe either; it is too rich in answers, each canceling out the rest. The quest for Meaning is foredoomed. Human life 'means' nothing. But this is not to say that it is not worth living. What does a Debussy Arabesque 'mean,' or a rainbow or a rose? A man delights in all of these, knowing himself to be no more
a wisp of music and a haze of dreams dissolving against the sun. Man has only his own two feet to stand on, his own human trinity to see him through: Reason, Courage, and Grace. And the first plus the second equals the third. — Peter De Vries

But the final price of freedom is the willingness to face that most frightening of all beings, one's own self. Starlight vision, the "other way of knowing," is the mode of perception of the unconscious, rather than the conscious mind. The depths of our own beings are not all sunlit; to see clearly, we must be willing to dive into the dark, inner abyss and acknowledge the creatures we may find there. For, as Jungian analyst M. Esther Harding explains in Woman's Mysteries, "These subjective factors ... are potent psychical entities, they belong to the totality of our being, they cannot be destroyed. So long as they are unrecognized outcasts from our conscious life, they will come between us and all the objects we view, and our whole world will be either distorted or illuminated. — Starhawk

Community as forgiveness ...
Too many people come into community to find something, to belong to a dynamic group, to discover a life which approaches the ideal. If we come into community without knowing that the reason we come is to learn to forgive and be forgiven seven times seventy-seven times, we will soon be disappointed. — Jean Vanier

Knowing that books are something that is hidden, that almost has that alchemical quality to it. There is a secret society in here, and if you belong to it, you'll be able to transform your lead into gold. I have that rather magical sense about books - that they do, somehow, have special powers. — Jeanette Winterson

It's terrifying when you're staring the person you know you want most in the world dead in the eyes, and knowing that they belong to you unequivocally. — L. H. Cosway

Since many of you do not belong to the Catholic Church and others are non-believers, from the bottom of my heart I give this silent blessing to each and every one of you, respecting the conscience of each one of you but knowing that each one of you is a child of God. — Pope Francis

How can another see into me, into my most secret self, without my being able to see in there myself? And without my being able to see him in me. And if my secret self, that which can be revealed only to the other, to the wholly other, to God if you wish, is a secret that I will never reflect on, that I will never know or experience or possess as my own, then what sense is there in saying that it is my secret, or in saying more generally that a secret belongs, that it is proper to or belongs to some one, or to some other who remains someone. It's perhaps there that we find the secret of secrecy. Namely, that it is not a matter of knowing and that it is there for no one. A secret doesn't belong, it can never be said to be at home or in its place. The question of the self: who am I not in the sense of who am I but rather who is this I that can say who? What is the- I and what becomes of responsibility once the identity of the I trembles in secret? — Jacques Derrida

Waking up next to you is what I like the most, knowing that you belong only to me makes me very happy. Being with you is all I need to be happy. — Auliq Ice

Maybe when we can tell the stories, however bad they are, we don't belong to them anymore. They become ours. And maybe what growing up really means is knowing that you don't have to just be a character, going whichever way the story says. It's knowing that you could be the author instead. — Ava Dellaira

My spirituality is severely challenged when I meet the most ignorant, evil and egotistical individuals in the world. It's even worse when I read their thoughts and can see how disgusting and psychotic they are behind their apparently clean appearance. In those moments, I wish I had a gun to shoot them in the head and send them to hell, where they belong. I regain my peace by knowing that they will certainly end there. — Robin Sacredfire

It is good and very grand to conquer external nature, but grander still to conquer our internal nature ... This conquering of the inner man, understanding the secrets of the subtle workings that are within the human mind, and knowing its wonderful secrets, belong entirely to religion. — Swami Vivekananda

Understanding our strengths, articulating our values, knowing where we belong
these are also essential to addressing one of the great challenges of organizations: improving the abysmally low productivity of knowledge workers. — Peter Drucker

There's a big difference between merely carrying the world inside you and knowing that you do! A madman can produce ideas that resemble Plato's, and a pious little schoolboy in a Herrnhut institute can creatively reconstruct profound mythological associations in his mind, ideas to be found in the Gnostics or Zoroaster. But he doesn't know he's doing it! He's a tree or a stone, at best an animal, just as long as he doesn't know that. But when the first spark of that knowledge glimmers, he becomes a human being. You certainly don't consider all the bipeds running around the street to be human beings merely because they walk upright and carry their young for nine months? After all, you see how many of them are fish or sheep, worms or leeches, how many are ants, how many are bees! Now, each one of them has the potentiality of becoming a human being, but only when he senses that potential, when he even learns to be conscious of it to some degree, does that potential belong to him. — Hermann Hesse

You'll sleep in my bed every night. There are times when I'll want to bind you in the bed so that you're helpless and dependent on me for everything. I'll make love to you while you're spread out and tied to my bedposts. Where your body will be available to me whenever I choose to take it. And I'll take you often, Joss. Before we go to bed at night. During the night. And first thing in the morning before you're fully awake. I'll slide into your beautiful body and I'll be the first thing you feel each morning. I'll be the last thing you know when you go to sleep at night. And you'll go to bed knowing you are mine and that you belong, heart and soul, to me. You'll never have cause to doubt it because not a day will go by that I won't prove that to you. — Maya Banks

If people want something to be wrong about you - they are going to make things wrong about you. That is why it is my belief to never try and prove anything to anyone. Real diamonds belong to people who know how to spot a real diamond; they don't belong to people who need to be convinced that they are real diamonds. It's the idiots who need to be convinced of something that they cannot already see. — C. JoyBell C.

Your deeper sense isn't a springboard; it's a landing place. If you draw conclusions too quickly or too slowly, you'll establish your self where it doesn't belong. The fine line between the two is in your own deeper sense. It is in your actual knowing within that deeper sense. — John De Ruiter

Recognizing someone as a part of you before they've even become that person in your life, and knowing, without a doubt, that neither of you will ever be who are you in this exact moment ever again and believing, against all odds, you will continue to belong to one another despite that. — Emily Henry

they will be welcomed with restraint in those strange lands because they do not belong, knowing they will have to sit on one buttock because they must not sit comfortably lest they be asked to rise and leave, knowing they will speak in dampened whispers because they must not let their voices drown those of the owners of the land, knowing they will have to walk on their toes because they must not leave footprints on the new earth lest they be mistaken for those who want to claim the land as theirs. — NoViolet Bulawayo

It is a great thing when I discover I am no longer my own but His. If the ten shillings in my pocket belong to me, then I have full authority over them. But if they belong to another who has committed them to me in trust, then I cannot buy what I please with them, and I dare not lose them. Real Christian life begins with knowing this. — Watchman Nee

Look at them leaving in droves despite knowing they will be welcomed with restraint in those strange lands because they do not belong, knowing they will have to sit on one buttock because they must not sit comfortable lest they be asked to rise and leave, knowing they will speak in dampened whispers because they must not let their voices drown those of the owners of the land, knowing they will have to walk on their toes because they must not leave footprints on the new earth lest they be mistaken for those who want to claim the land as theirs. Look at them leaving in droves, arm in arm with loss and lost, look at them leaving in droves. — NoViolet Bulawayo

You can't sit down and write 300 compositions in a three-month period and think that you're doing it all by yourself. Obviously, there's something going on here. And whether you want to call it channeling or being connected to a creative force or knowing your history and knowing where you belong, that's, you know, maybe a personal thing. — John Zorn

First, pray that God would reveal and then remove anything in your heart that doesn't belong there - resentments, anger, sinful thoughts. Second, pray for big things, knowing that if God can use a young shepherd boy, He can use anyone in a big way! Make your heart available to God's power and see what amazing things He will do through you. Dear Lord, I am so grateful that You do not judge me the way people do. Thank You that You look on my heart to see my thoughts, attitudes, and love for You, and not how successful or attractive I am. Show me anything in my heart that should not be there, and I will confess it before You. Remove all sinful desires and fill my heart with Your love, peace, and joy. — Stormie O'martian

And you'll go to bed knowing you are mine and that you belong, heart and soul, to me. — Maya Banks

115The East and the West belong to God: wherever you turn, there is His Face.b God is all pervading and all knowing. — Anonymous

full well knowing that, whatever little motes my beamy eyes may have descried in theirs, they belong to a kind, generous, large-hearted, and great people. — Charles Dickens

Maybe knowing where you belong is not equal to knowing who you are. — Jodi Picoult

A generous heart is always open, always ready to receive our going and coming. In the midst of such love we need never fear abandonment. This is the most precious gift true love offers - the experience of knowing we always belong. — Bell Hooks

We will have to remember where our cranks belong in our national life, so that they can resume their proper roles as lonely guardians of the frontiers of the national imagination, prodding and pushing, getting us to think about things in new ways, but also knowing that their place is of necessity a lonely and humble one. There is nothing wrong with a country that has people who put saddles on their dinosaurs. It's a wonderful show and we should watch them and applaud. We have no obligation to climb aboard and ride. — Charles P. Pierce

If someone asked you what the greatest good on this earth is, what would you say? An epic surf session? Financial security? Health? Meaningful, trusting friendships? Intimacy with your spouse? Knowing that you belong? The greatest good on this earth is God. Period. God's one goal for us is Himself. — Francis Chan