Quotes About Belonging

He found himself in the strange predicament all sailors share: essentially he belonged neither to the land nor to the sea. Possibly a man who hates the land should dwell on shore forever. Alienation and the long voyages at sea will compel him once again to dream of it, torment him with the absurdity of longing for something that he loathes.

my grief at being eternally excluded…

It takes a tribe to raise a human.

In order to flourish we still need to ground ourselves in intimate communities. For millions of years, humans have been adapted to living in small bands of no more than a few dozen people. Even today most of us find it impossible to really know more than 150 individuals, irrespective of how many Facebook friends we boast.4 And if we don't belong to any intimate community, we humans feel lonely and alienated.

it is hardly natural for humans to be loyal to millions of utter strangers.

Sapiens instinctively divide humanity into two parts, 'we' and 'they'. We are people like you and me, who share our language, religion and customs. We are all responsible for each other, but not responsible for them. We were always distinct from them, and owe them nothing. We don't want to see any of them in our territory, and we don't care an iota what happens in their territory. They are barely even human.

The problem starts when benign patriotism morphs into chauvinistic ultranationalism.

being born into an African American family in an African American neighborhood meant that he was surrounded by people like him who taught him what he needed to know in order to survive and flourish

By waving a colorful flag and singing an anthem you transform the nation from an abstract story into a tangible reality.

Alternatively, people might completely give up on having a global story of any kind and instead seek shelter in local nationalist and religious tales.

for decades, membership in all kinds of groups has declined as much as one-quarter. That's a lot of people who now need to find a sense of purpose and support somewhere else.

Durante mucho tiempo, Homo sapiens prefirió considerarse separado de los animales, un huérfano carente de familia, sin hermanos ni primos y, más importante todavía, sin padres.

People with strong families who live in tight-knit and supportive communities are significantly happier than people whose families are dysfunctional and who have never found (or never sought) a community to be part of.

you don't feel at home in your body, you will never feel at home in the world.

Millions of years of evolution have designed us to live and think as community members. Within a mere two centuries we have become alienated individuals. Nothing testifies better to the awesome power of culture.

Hardly anyone has just one identity. Nobody is just a Muslim, or just an Italian, or just a capitalist.

Personally, I was never the cool kid. I was always sort of a bookworm. I would just like to be more like Troy, because he's so cool.

I had no interest in sports so I didn't make friends in that traditional way where kids are in public school and they go and they join clubs, and play sports. So I kind of had to find my own way to make friends and get attention and so I just was the class clown.

she has carried this sacred sense of community building into

From the very earliest ages, our children need to know that they belong to God. God created them for a purpose, and He created them in His image. We are all His image-bearers. We bear His likeness. Our ability to think, love, and communicate indicates that we were created in God's likeness.

I knew you"d never be American enough to help me reconstruct my life.

We creoles are so different, one from the other, that it's hard for us to mix properly amongst ourselves, let alone among Carib people who have a lot more things in common. Maybe its because Carib people remind us of what we lost trying to get up in the world. See, in the old days, according to Granny Straker, the more you left behind the old ways, the more acceptable you were to the powerful people in the government and the churches who had the power to change a black person's life.

I never worry because I know who I am and I know Whose I am.

Belonging to a place isn't nearly as necessary as belonging to people you love and who love you and need you.