Quotes About Alienation

The ideal potential convert is the individual who stands alone, who has no collective body he can blend with and lose himself in and so mask the pettiness, meaninglessness and shabbiness of his individual existence.

Né quelque part où il ne fallait pas, j'ai voulu en partir ; réclamant le statut de réfugié, j'ai dégringolé d'identité en identité, migrant, mendiant, illégal, sans-papiers, sans-droits, sans-travail ; le seul vocable qui me définit désormais est clandestin.

Alienation as we find it in modern society is almost total… Man has created a world of man-made things as it never existed before. He has constructed a complicated social machine to administer the technical machine he built. The more powerful and gigantic the forces are which he unleashes, the more powerless he feels himself as a human being. He is owned by his creations, and has lost ownership of himself.

A person who has not been completely alienated, who has remained sensitive and able to feel, who has not lost the sense of dignity, who is not yet "for sale," who can still suffer over the suffering of others, who has not acquired fully the having mode of existence—briefly, a person who has remained a person and not become a thing—cannot help feeling lonely, powerless, isolated in present-day society.

Man does not suffer so much from poverty today as he suffers from the fact that he has become a cog in a large machine, an automaton, that his life has become empty and lost its meaning.

Also in contemporary Western society the union with the group is the prevalent way of overcoming separateness. It is a union which the individual self disappears to a large extent, and where the aim is to belong to the heard. If I am like everybody else, if I have no feeling or thoughts which make me different, if I conform in custom, dress, ideas, to the pattern of the group, I am saved: saved from the frightening experience of aloneness.

Indeed the alienated person finds it almost impossible to remain by himself, because he is seized by the panic of experiencing nothingness.

We consume, as we produce, without any concrete relatedness to the objects with which we deal; We live in a world of things, and our only connection with them is that we know how to manipulate or to consume them.

It seems that nothing is more difficult for the average man to bear than the feeling of not being identified with a larger group.

The common suffering is the alienation from oneself, from one's fellow man, and from nature; the awareness that life runs out of one's hand like sand, and that one will die without having lived; that one lives in the midst of plenty and yet is joyless.

The absolutely alienated individual worships at the altar of an idol, and it makes little difference by what names this idol is known.

To transcend nature, to be alienated from nature and from another human being, finds man naked, ashamed. He is alone and free, yet powerless and afraid.

The "tourist" with his camera is an outstanding symbol of an alienated relationship to the world. Being constantly occupied with taking pictures, actually he does not see anything at all, except through the intermediary of the camera. The camera sees for him, and the outcome of his "pleasure" trip is a collection of snapshots, which are the substitute for an experience which he could have had, but did not have.

Moi, depuis l'âge de treize ans, je me suis toujours senti, partout, un invité. Souvent accueilli à bras ouverts, parfois tout juste toléré, mais nulle part habitant de plein droit. Constamment dissemblable, mal ajusté – mon nom, mon regard, mon allure, mon accent, mes appartenances réelles ou supposées. Incurablement étranger. Sur la terre natale comme plus tard sur les terres d'exil.

Beaucoup ont quitté leur terre natale, et beaucoup d'autres, sans l'avoir quitté ne la reconnaissent plus.

So I've become an exile without ever leaving my country.

I'm not my brother's keeper" is the lie infecting our streets and our neighborhoods (Genesis 4:9). This lie alienates us from God and one another.

Fue a partir de entonces, cuando yo fui MALA. Para todos, no. Para Tata Maria, Isabel, Jerónimo y Fabián, sólo un poco rara.

Qué extranjera raza la de los adultos, la de los hombres y las mujeres. Qué extranjeros y absurdos, nosotros. Qué fuera del mundo y hasta del tiempo. Ya no eramos niños. De pronto ya no sabíamos lo que éramos.

Nessuno di noi due aveva grandi legami con gli altri nostri compagni, io per timidezza e perché li consideravo parte di un mondo che non volevo accettare, Guido perché era troppo diverso da loro.

While his life was impeccable on the surface, he felt he was behind glass; moving through the world in a separate compartment, touching no one else.

If an alien with an accounting degree touched down in America, it might conclude that we're a weird cult that spends 11 months living frugally and four crazy weeks buying tons of stuff we don't need. It wouldn't be entirely wrong, either.

Growing up in the '80s in central New Jersey as a weird kid with a blue mohawk listening to the Sex Pistols and dressing really funky, I was bullied pretty badly. It was every single day in elementary school and kept going into middle school, too. I felt totally alone, without a single person there for me.

I remembered what it was like: the weirdness, being the odd man out, trying to make my way around campus, and trying to figure out who my friends would be, who to steer clear of. I wrote it all down in a fanciful way - the feelings of alienation, the feelings of uncertainty, of being away from home for the first time.