Quotes About Sense Of Belonging

“Nationalities are a facist way of thinking aimed at forcing people into a narrow and stupid sense of belonging. It makes some people feel superior to others and perpetuates hatred and war.”

— Alaa Al Aswany

“People will typically be more enthusiastic where they feel a sense of belonging and see themselves as part of a community than they will in a workplace in which each person is left to his own devices”

— Alfie Kohn

“To a man utterly without a sense of belonging, mere life is all that matters. It is the only reality in an eternity of nothingness, and he clings to it with shameless despair.”

— Eric Hoffer

“According to the psychologist irving Janis, is that our sense of belonging (which makes us feel safe) blinds us to dangers and encourages greater risk-taking.”

— Margaret Heffernan

“My mother's psychic says, everyone essentially wants
the same thing as everyone else, a sense of belonging, a coming home.”

— Ada Limon

“When two people form an unbreakable bond, it's like a reactor, feeding them power and heat and a sense of belonging. It makes them strong. They're the true superheroes.”

— Kresley Cole

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

— Steve Maraboli

“Our stories are not meant for everyone. Hearing them is a privilege, and we should always ask ourselves this before we share: "Who has earned the right to hear my story?" If we have one or two people in our lives who can sit with us and hold space for our shame stories, and love us for our strengths and struggles, we are incredibly lucky. If we have a friend, or small group of friends, or family who embraces our imperfections, vulnerabilities, and power, and fills us with a sense of belonging, we are incredibly lucky.”

— Brené Brown

“Authenticity is the daily practice of letting go of who we think we're supposed to be and embracing who we are. Choosing authenticity means cultivating the courage to be imperfect, to set boundaries, and to allow ourselves to be vulnerable; exercising the compassion that comes from knowing that we are all made of strength and struggle; and nurturing the connection and sense of belonging that can only happen when we believe that we are enough. Authenticity demands Wholehearted living and loving-even when it's hard, even when we're wrestling with the shame and fear of not being good enough, and especially when the joy is so intense that we're afraid to let ourselves feel it. Mindfully practicing authenticity during our most soul-searching struggles is how we invite grace, joy, and gratitude into our lives.”

— Brené Brown

“Think we're supposed to be and embracing who we are. Choosing authenticity means cultivating the courage to be imperfect, to set boundaries, and to allow ourselves to be vulnerable; exercising the compassion that comes from knowing that we are all made of strength and struggle; and nurturing the connection and sense of belonging that can only happen when we believe that we are enough.”

— Brené Brown

“A sense of belonging is not physical. We cant find it by changing where we live or what we do. We have to carry it within us”

— P.C. Cast

“For years I lived my life suspended, trapped by the past, unable to move into the future. Like every wounded child I just wanted to turn back time and be in that paradise again, in that moment of remembered rapture where I felt loved, where I felt a sense of belonging. We can never go back. I know that now. We can go forward .We can find the love our hearts long for, but not until we let go grief about the love we lost long ago, when we were little and had no voice to speak the heart's longing. All the years of my life I thought I was searching for love I found, retrospectively, to be years where I was simply trying to recover what had been lost, to return to the first home, to get back the rapture of our first love. I was not really ready to love or be loved in the present. I was still mourning
clinging to the broken heart of girlhood, to broken connections. When that mourning ceased I was able to love again.”

— Bell Hooks

“I envy the happiness of others ... I envy the sense of belonging ... I seem always to be remaking myself.”

— Richard Eyre

“Acceptance is the sense of belonging.”

— M.F. Moonzajer

“To be able to enjoy fully the many good things the world has to offer, we must be detached from them. To be detached does not mean to be indifferent or uninterested. It means to be non-possessive. Life is a gift to be grateful for and not a property to cling to.
A non-possessive life is a free life. But such freedom is only possible when we have a deep sense of belonging. To whom then do we belong? We belong to God, and the God to whom we belong has sent us into the world to proclaim in his Name that all of creation is created in and by love and calls us to gratitude and joy. That is what the 'detached' life is all about. It is a life in which we are free to offer praise and thanksgiving.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

“A musical, like most religions, provides the audience or followers with a sense of belonging. Religious services, on the other hand, with their staged performances, invigorating songs, popular wisdom and shared experience, are almost a form of community theater.”

— Lisa Randall

“There are days when I walk through the center of Stockholm when I get this sudden feeling of happiness - a sense of belonging and at the same time gratitude that I'm so privileged that I can live my life in my city.”

— Bjorn Ulvaeus

“At a time when most of my peers were struggling to find an identity, I knew exactly who I was: the church girl, the girl who always had a place in her youth group family, the girl on fire for God. I'm not sure I can ever calculate the value of that community, that sense of belonging and of being loved. It never even occurred to me that such a fire could be washed out.”

— Rachel Held Evans

“I'm trying to make a case for those people who don't have a sense of belonging that they should have, that there is something really worthwhile in having a sense of belonging, and recasting and looking at our modern history.”

— Billy Bragg

“The cell phone has become the adult's transitional object, replacing the toddler's teddy bear for comfort and a sense of belonging.”

— Margaret Heffernan

“The hardest thing about being at Sony was not the travel; it was being divorced from the public and private life I had in New York. Travelling as much as I did, while I didn't lose connection with my friends, I lost a sense of belonging.”

— Howard Stringer

“Community as belonging ...
In many groups of people and clubs of all sorts (political, sports, leisure, liberal professions, etc.) people find a sense of security. They are happy to find others like themselves. They receive comfort one from another, and they encourage one another in their ways. But frequently there is a certain elitism. They are convinced that they are better than others. And, of course, not everyone can join the club; people have to qualify. Frequently these groups give security and a sense of belonging but they do not encourage personal growth. Belonging in such groups is not for becoming.
You can often tell the people who belong to a particular club, group or community by what they wear, especially on feast days, or by their hairstyle, their jargon or accent or by badges and colours of some sort. Grouping seems to need symbols which express the fact that they are one tribe, one family, one group.”

— Jean Vanier

“It is that, but really, it's about how we don't recognise the little things in life, or appreciate the little things in life like belonging. A sense of belonging is a big thing today.”

— James Caan

“I'm not practising, I don't go to church, but what I got from it was a sense of belonging to something bigger. What I really miss is being forced to be in a community with people that aren't the same as you. Then, you really have to work through the ways that you're different.”

— Win Butler

“I firmly believe that any good journalist must essentially be temperamentally an outsider. I don't think full sense of belonging and security is conducive to creativity.”

— J. Anthony Lukas

“Since crime often grows out of a sense of futility and despair, Negro parents must be urged to give their children the love, attention, and sense of belonging that a segregated society deprives them of.”

— Martin Luther King, Jr.

“Each member of the family in his own cell of consciousness, each making his own patchwork quilt of reality - collecting fragments of experience here, pieces of information there. From the tiny impressions gleaned from one another, they created a sense of belonging and tried to make do with the way they found each other.”

— Toni Morrison

“Giving connects two people, the giver and the receiver, and this connection gives birth to a new sense of belonging.”

— Deepak Chopra

“You have to understand, beauty differs from country to country. When I came to India, I found my sense of belonging and appreciation. People thought I was beautiful.”

— Katrina Kaif

“How could I have thought that I needed to cure myself in order to fit into the 'real' world? I didn't need curing, and the world didn't, either; the only thing that did need curing was my understanding of my place in it. Without that understanding - without a sense of belonging to the real world - it was impossible to thrive in an imagined one.”

— Jonathan Franzen

“And so, when a person meets the half that is his very own, whatever his orientation, whether it's to young men or not, then something wonderful happens: the two are struck from their senses by love, by a sense of belonging to one another, and by desire, and they don't want to be separated from one another, not even for a moment.”

— Plato

“Once people grasp that the events of the Messiah's death and resurrection have transformed everything and that they are now living between that initial explosive event and God's final setting right of the world (when God is "all in all"), then everything will change: belief, behavior, attitudes, expectations, and not least a new love, a real sense of belonging, which springs up among those who share all this. That is what so much of Paul's writing is about.”

— N.T. Wright

“Adoption has the dimension of connection - not only to your own tribe, but beyond, widening the scope of what constitutes love, ties and family. It is a larger embrace. By adopting, we stretch past our immediate circles and, by reaching out, find an unexpected sense of belonging with others.”

— Isabella Rossellini

“Creating traditions in the blended family promote unity and a sense of belonging.”

— Diane Greene

“Faith is a quality of being: of being in touch with oneself, with life, and with the universe. It is a sense of belonging to one's community, to one's country and to the earth. Above all it is a feeling of being grounded in one's body, in one's humanity, and in one's animal nature. It can be all of these things because it is a manifestation of life, an expression of the living force that unites all beings. It is a biological phenomenon and not a psychic creation.”

— Alexander Lowen

“Most asylum seekers do get permanent visas, so the earlier they receive the appropriate help, the faster they will become part of the community. They'll get jobs and start paying taxes too. They will see Australia as a nation with a sense of care and concern. That's so important for a cohesive society. It helps build a sense of belonging. And in terms of common decency, it's what should be happening ... For God's sake, this is Australia, people should be treated with decency and humanity.”

— Malcolm Fraser

“I've also never written about home in this way before. I guess a lot of it is subconscious and I am intuitively making these decisions when I'm writing. I wanted to communicate in the book that on one hand, being at home - both in our homes and in DeLisle - gives us a sense of belonging and family and safety, but at the same time, being in those places makes us less safe.”

— Jesmyn Ward

“In all cultures, the family imprints its members with selfhood. Human experience of identity has two elements; a sense of belonging and a sense of being separate. The laboratory in which these ingredients are mixed and dispensed is the family, the matrix of identity.”

— Salvador Minuchin

“From the outside, people think it's drug-related. But wherever you come from, people are driven by a sense of belonging. What I say to kids all the time is you don't own streets. We don't own the paving stones we are fighting over. Instead of fighting each other, you should be fighting the government to make this a better place to live.”

— Ashley Walters

“Detach the writer from the milieu where he has experienced his greatest sense of belonging, and you have created a discontinuity within his personality, a short circuit in his identity. The result is his originality, his creativity comes to an end. He becomes the one-book novelist or the one-trilogy writer.”

— Henry Roth

“I say the elite looks out of touch because it's kind of saying; look we'll manage all this for you. You know, we know best. We'll sort it all out for you. And then because people believe that doesn't meet their case for change and they want real change, social media and the way the relationship between people can come into a sense of belonging very quickly, that then is itself a revolutionary phenomenon. You see this around the world.”

— Tony Blair

“Motivation and inspiration energize people, not by pushing them in the right direction as control mechanisms do but by satisfying basic human needs for achievement, a sense of belonging, recognition, self-esteem, a feeling of control over one's life, and the ability to live up to one's ideals. Such feelings touch us deeply and elicit a powerful response.”

— John P. Kotter

“Any decent society must generate a feeling of community. Community offsets
loneliness. It gives people a vitally necessary sense of belonging. Yet today
the institutions on which community depends are crumbling in all the
techno-societies. The result is a spreading plague of loneliness.”

— Alvin Toffler

“The sense of belonging is one of the great gifts men get in battle.”

— James A. Michener

“Unity must be of the mind and heart, a sense of belonging together and of facing together those who attack it.”

— Jawaharlal Nehru

“We know that where community exists in confers upon its members identity, a sense of belonging, and a measure of security ... Communities are the ground-level generators and preservers of values and ethical systems.”

— John Gardner

“What we want is another sample of life, which is not on our tree of life at all. All life that we've studied so far on Earth belongs to the same tree. We share genes with mushrooms and oak trees and fish and bacteria that live in volcanic vents and so on that it's all the same life descended from a common origin. What we want is a second tree of life. We want alien life, alien not necessarily in the sense of having come from space, but alien in the sense of belonging to a different tree altogether. That is what we're looking for, "life 2.0."”

— Paul Davies

“Happiness, I think, has to come in the beginning, truly, from feeling a sense of well-being within yourself. To me it's that incredible sense of belonging and peace within your own self and heart that really is joy.”

— Goldie Hawn

“The best of community does give one a deep sense of belonging and well-being; and in that sense community takes away loneliness.”

— Henri Nouwen

“People come to Paris, to the capital, to give their lives a sense of belonging, of an almost mythical participation in society.”

— Marguerite Duras