belonging Quotes

“I have come home at last! This is my real country! I belong here. This is the land I have been looking for all my life, though I never knew it till now.”

“One of the biggest surprises in this research was learning that fitting in and belonging are not the same thing. In fact, fitting in is one of the greatest barriers to belonging. Fitting in is about assessing a situation and becoming who you need to be in order to be accepted. Belonging, on the other hand, doesn’t require us to change who we are; it requires us to be who we are.”

“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.”

“It wasn’t just that she missed her friends; she was starting to wonder if she needed them around to feel like she existed at all.”

“To know that you can navigate the wilderness on your own--to know that you can stay true to your beliefs, trust yourself, and survive it--that is true belonging.”

“When a group or community doesn’t tolerate dissent and disagreement, it forgoes any experience of inextricable connection. There is no true belonging, only an unspoken treaty to hate the same people. This fuels our spiritual crisis of disconnection.”

“Stop walking through the world looking for confirmation that you don’t belong. You will always find it because you’ve made that your mission. Stop scouring people’s faces for evidence that you’re not enough. You will always find it because you’ve made that your goal. True belonging and self-worth are not goods; we don’t negotiate their value with the world. The truth about who we are lives in our hearts. Our call to courage is to protect our wild heart against constant evaluation, especially your own. No one belongs here more than you.”

“Most of us are showing up to ensure that people’s basic needs are met and their civil rights are upheld. But we’re also working to make sure that everyone gets to experience what brings meaning to life: love, belonging, and joy. These are essential, irreducible needs for all of us. And we can’t give people what we don’t have. We can’t fight for what’s not in our hearts.”

“There will be times when standing alone feels too hard, too scary, and we’ll doubt our ability to make our way through the uncertainty. Someone, somewhere, will say, ‘Don’t do it. You don’t have what it takes to survive the wilderness.’ This is when you reach deep into your heart and remind yourself, ‘I am the wilderness.‘”

“When you know and respect your Inner Nature, you know where you belong. You also know where you don’t belong.”

“We couldn’t take Momma’s shells, nor Ruth’s baby doll made of flannel bits and calico, nor the wooden bowl Poppa made for me. Nothing belonged to us.”

“See why I’ve got to go back? I don’t belong here. I belong in your world, at Hogwarts.”

“I celebrate myself, and sing myself, And what I assume you shall assume, For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.”

“I didn’t feel like I belonged with my family, and now I didn’t feel like I belonged with Adam, except unlike my family, who was stuck with me, Adam had chosen me, and this I didn’t understand.”

″[Jurgis] could not hear it often enough; he could not ask with enough variations. Yes, they had bought the house, they had really bought it. It belonged to them, they had only to pay the money and it would be all right. Then Jurgis covered his face with his hands, for there were tears in his eyes, and he felt like a fool. But he had had such a horrible fright; strong man as he was, it left him almost too weak to stand up.”

“I saw them lost in conversation with each other, mother and father, while their sons commanded entire sidewalks with their tricycles. The galaxy belonged to them, and as terror was communicated to our children, I saw mastery communicated to theirs.”

“I want my own sort!”

“Do you think there’s a difference? Between belonging with and belong to, I mean?”

“Margot would say she belongs to herself. Kitty would say she belongs to no one. And I guess I would say I belong to my sisters and my dad, but that won’t always be true. To belong to someone - I didn’t know it, but now that I think about it, it seems like that’s all I’ve ever wanted. To really be somebody’s , and to have them be mine.”

“We don’t belong to each other: he’s an independent, and so am I.”

″‘Are you looking for a home?’ the preacher asked, real soft, to Winn-Dixie. Winn-Dixie wagged his tail. ‘Well,’ the preacher said. ‘I guess you’ve found one.‘”

“We belonged to each other, but had lived so far apart that we belonged to others now.”

“I thought about Hailsham closing, and how it was like someone coming along with a pair of shears and snipping the balloon strings just where they entwined above the man’s fist. Once that happened, there’d be no real sense in which those balloons belonged with each other any more.”

“We spend a lot of time thinking about the ways that prestige and resources and belonging to elite institutions make us better off. We don’t spend enough time thinking about the ways in which those kinds of material advantages limit our options.”

“Maybe my problem isn’t that I can’t go home. I will miss my mother and father and Caleb and evening firelight and the clack of my mother’s knitting needles, but that is not the only reason for this hollow feeling in my stomach. My problem might be that even if I did go home, I wouldn’t belong there, among people who give without thinking and care without trying.”

“I’ve seen you, beauty, and you belong to me now, whoever you are waiting for and if I never see you again, I thought. You belong to me and all Paris belongs to me and I belong to this notebook and this pencil.”

“I knew that the land was just the place for a Gribley”

“They have accepted me as an individual, as a personality, as an entity. I belong! I am important! I am somebody!”

“What could I become if I stopped worrying about death, about pain, about anything? If I stopped trying to belong? Instead of being afraid, I could become something to fear.”

“You’re the kind of girl I should have married. ”

“Coming to her made him feel perfectly welcomed, perfectly at home, as he had never in his life felt before.”

″‘I don’t hate it here,’ she said automatically. Surprising herself, she realized that as much as she’d been trying to convince herself otherwise, she was telling the truth. ‘It’s just that I don’t belong here.‘”

“I looked up once more, at the whole world; it was beautiful, I knew it was, but I wasn’t a part of it. I was never going to be a part of it.”

“We may act sophisticated and worldly but I believe we feel safest when we go inside ourselves and find home, a place where we belong and maybe the only place we really do.”

“Whatever happens to you belongs to you. Make it yours. Feed it to yourself even if it feels impossible to swallow. Let it nurture you, because it will.”

“Do I really want to be integrated into a burning house? ”

“Ani lay down and, putting one arm over her face as though it were a wing, tried to shut out the world where she did not belong.”

“I fooled myself. I had to. Everybody has to. If the good had been twice as good and the bad only half as bad, I still ought to have seen it, all through as I did in the beginning, because I am, as you say, sensitive. But I didn’t want to see it, because I would have then had to think about the consequences of seeing it, what followed from seeing it, what I must do to be decent. I wanted my home and family, my job, my career, a place in the community.”

“True belonging is not passive. It’s not the belonging that comes with just joining a group. It’s not fitting in or pretending or selling out because it’s safer. It’s a practice that requires us to be vulnerable, get uncomfortable, and learn how to be present with people without sacrificing who we are. We want true belonging, but it takes tremendous courage to knowingly walk into hard moments.”

“All my heart is yours, sir: it belongs to you; and with you it would remain, were fate to exile the rest of me from your presence forever.”

“Belonging so fully to yourself that you’re willing to stand alone is a wilderness--an untamed, unpredictable place of solitude and searching. It is a place as dangerous as it is breathtaking, a place as sought after as it is feared...it turns out to be the place of true belonging, and it’s the bravest and most sacred place you will ever stand. ”

“Because true belonging only happens when we present our authentic, imperfect selves to the world, our sense of belonging can never be greater than our level of self-acceptance.”

“Quick, dear boy, come in, let me look at you, look to my heart’s content -- under my own roof, the rover home at last.”

“Even in the world of make-believe there have to be rules. The parts have to be consistent and belong together.”

“Thyself and thy belongings are not thine own so proper as to waste thyself upon thy virtues, they on thee.”

“Feet are what connect you to the ground, and when you are poor, none of that ground belongs to you.”

“It seeks God knowing that it has already been found by Him. It travels to Heaven realizing obscurely that it has already arrived.”

“The next morning all the swelling had left my face and legs and arms, and I felt well as ever; but everything around me seemed strange and as though it were far away. I remember that for twelve days after that I wanted to be alone, and it seemed I did not belong to my people.”

“This place, where few were admitted, was like a mixture of a chapel and a bazaar, full of religious objects and the most varied assortment of things.”

“All the old things which Madame Aubain no longer wanted, she took for her room.”

“You are this earth. You are not a fantasy: you are my love. And love is friendship lit by a wooden match with a white tip on its red tip. I am your match, and you are mine.”

“Stay home and the crooks win. They get the night, by default and concession, the night which should rightly belong to all of us.”

“Without laughter there is no hope. Without hope there is no life.”

“After all this time, I know exactly where I belong. Here. With Edmond. And that’s how I live now.”

“Sometimes when I’m tucked into my potato chips bag, I look up at all the cozy windows and wonder what it would be like to live with creature comforts. To belong to somebody. To be a real pet.”

“They said the girl had surely become one of the wild horses at last.”

“Everything belonged here, everything blended together—except for himself.”

“My crew is my family and though I could never say it- perhaps, don’t need to say it- the Saad is my true home.”

“Daring leaders work to make sure people can be themselves and feel a sense of belonging.”

″...you’ll find friends you like you for who you are.”

″‘We’ll come back,’ said Papa. ‘I know,’ said Anna. She remembered how she had felt when they had gone back to the Gasthof Zwirn for the holidays and added, ‘But it won’t be the same- we won’t belong. Do you think we’ll ever really belong anywhere?’ ‘I suppose not,’ said Papa.”

″‘I suppose not,’ said Papa. ‘Not the way people belong who have lived in one place all their lives. But we’ll belong a little in lots of places, and I think that may be just as good.‘”

“And when bedtime came something even worse happened. Teddy Robinson and Deborah got into bed as usual, and what should they find but the blue dog already there, lying right in the middle of the bed, and smiling up at them both, just as if he belonged there.”