Quotes About Exile

The whole world was nothing but an exile with no hope of a return.

I feel that it is necessary and ordained that I should be alone, a stranger and an exile in relation to every human circle, without exception.

Albert Einstein, who had been exiled from Germany for his guilty devotion to mathematics, world peace, and the violin, was now exiled from America for the same crimes.

cast me away, my friends— this great murderous ruin, this man cursed to heaven, the man the deathless gods hate most of all!

Don't follow a defeated foe. Follow Christ. It is costly. You will be an exile in this age. But you will be free.

After escaping from Paris and finally leaving France entirely, Calvin spent his exile in Basel, Switzerland, between 1534 and 1536. To redeem the time, "he devoted himself to the study of Hebrew." (Imagine such a thing! Would any pastor today, exiled from his church and country, and living in mortal danger, study Hebrew? What has become of the vision of ministry that such a thing seems unthinkable today?)

Against a wall a faded blonde woman—an exiled angel, the hints of beauty still lingering on her palewhite face—sits with blackoutlined eyes burning into the bar.

To deprive a gregarious creature of companionship is to maim it, to outrage its nature. The prisoner and the cenobite are aware that the herd exists beyond their exile; they are an aspect of it. But when the herd no longer exists, there is, for the herd creature, no longer entity, a part of no whole; a freak without a place. If he cannot hold on to his reason, then he is lost indeed; most utterly, most fearfully lost, so that he becomes no more than the twitch in the limb of a corpse.

As the defenders of truth refuse to honor the Sunday-sabbath, some of them will be thrust into prison, some will be exiled, some will be treated as slaves. To human wisdom all this now seems impossible; but as the restraining Spirit of God shall be withdrawn from men, and they shall be under the control of Satan, who hates the divine precepts, there will be strange developments. The heart can be very cruel when God's fear and love are removed.

A self-respecting man is a man without a country. A fatherland is birdlime...

Melancholy is a kind of boredom refined, the feeling that one does not belong to this world. It's a sensation of irremediable exile, without immediate cause. Melancholy is a feeling deeply autonomous, also independent of the failure of those great personal successes. Nostalgia, on the contrary, still clings to something, even if it is only to the past.

Le romantisme anglais fut un mélange heureux de laudanum, d'exil et de phtisie; le romantisme allemand, d'alcool, de province et de suicide.

All my life, I have lived with the feeling that I have been kept from my true place. If the expression "metaphysical exile" had no meaning, my existence alone would afford it one.

If the expression "metaphysical exile" had no meaning, my existence alone would afford it one.

If he changes his country, his drama merely begins again: exodus is his seat, his certainty, his chez soi.

Another favorite hymn mourns Israel's lonely exile from the Son of God. Another years for a future in which every knee will bow to Jesus. Another urges Christian soldiers onward, marching as to war. When I imagined singing it with a Muslim or Hindu student sitting next to me, my voice dried up. It was a song for insiders, not outsiders. If I had learned anything from going on all of those class field trips, it was how religious language sounds to outsiders, and how much that matters.

Without a country, you are the basket of humanity.

Our parents were then driven out of Paradise, and one leaf alone was given to each, wherewith to hide their nakedness.

It is at once by way of poetry and through poetry, as with music, that the soul glimpses splendors from beyond the tomb; and when an exquisite poem brings one's eyes to the point of tears, those tears are not evidence of an excess of joy, they are witness far more to an exacerbated melancholy, a disposition of the nerves, a nature exiled among imperfect things, which would like to possess, without delay, a paradise revealed on this very same earth.

My exile was not only a physical one, motivated exclusively by political reasons; it was also a moral, social, ideological and sexual exile.

We learn, grow and become compassionate and generous as much through exile as homecoming, as much through loss as gain, as much through giving things away as in receiving what we believe to be our due.

It is devilish to suffer from a pain that is all but nameless. Blessed are they who are stricken only with classifiable diseases! Blessed are the poor, the sick, the crossed in love, for at least other people know what is the matter with them and will listen to their belly-achings with sympathy. But who that has not suffered it understands the pains of exile?

I am thrice homeless, as a native of Bohemia in Austria, as an Austrian among Germans, and as a Jew throughout the world. Everywhere an intruder, never welcomed.

No matter where I go or what title I may achieve, I will always be the son of exiles.