Quotes About Alienation

I felt like the kid in the backseat who can't hear what the adults are talking about, it made me feel a little but invisible.

But with me he's been distant. Like even though he's right here next to me, he feels far away. Unreachable.

It's like I came back and there was a whole new family here that I wasn't a part of.

One after another of his old friends and comrades fell back and vanished from his ken, for he lost interest in them when he saw less and less difference between these men of the opposition and that majority which they attacked. Everything seemed to him to melt together in one great hostile mass of boredom.

More and more, I'd been having this feelings of zeroness. Of HERE-I-AM-AND-IT-JUST-DOESN'T-MATTER.

When life becomes sub-human, sub-humans come alive.

To feel completely alone and isolated leads to mental disintegration just as physical starvation leads to death.

It is the fact that man does not experience himself as the active bearer of his own powers and richness, but as an impoverished "thing," dependent on powers outside of himself, unto whom he has projected his living substance. As the reference to idolatry indicates, alienation is by no means a modern phenomenon.

Man] has transformed himself into a thing.

It is one of the most characteristic and destructive developments of our own society that man, becoming more and more of an instrument, transforms reality more and more into something relative to his own interests and functions.

Une société essentiellement vouée au consumérisme et à l'accumulation de marchandises induit l'individu à minorer son souci d'être (être bien, être quelqu'un de bien, faire le bien) et à majorer ses tendances à avoir, à accaparer, à s'aliéner dans les choses, accumuler les pouvoirs.

God, originally a symbol for the highest value that we can experience within us, becomes, in the having mode, an idol. In the prophetic concept, an idol is a thing that we ourselves make and project our own powers into, thus impoverishing ourselves. We then submit to our creation and by our submission are in touch with ourselves in an alienated form. While I can have the idol because it is a thing, by my submission to it, it, simultaneously, has me.

It is not enough that men are not slaves; if social conditions further the existence of automatons, the result will not be love of life, but love of death.

The person who gives up his individual self and becomes an automaton, identical with millions of other automatons around him, need not feel alone and anxious any more. But the price he pays, however, is high; it is the loss of his self.

Jesus thus becomes an idol; the belief in him becomes the substitute for one's own act of loving. In a simple, unconscious formula: "Christ does all the loving for us; we can go on in the pattern of the Greek hero, yet we are saved because the alienated 'faith' in Christ is a substitute for the imitation of Christ." That Christian belief is also a cheap cover for one's own rapacious attitude goes without saying.

Ma mõtlesin, et elame konservide ajastul.'' ''Konservide? Kuidas nii?'' Ravic osutas ajalehtedele. ''Meil pole enam tarvis mõtelda. Kõik on ette mõeldud, ette mälutud, ette tunnetatud. Konservid. Jääb üle ainult avada. Kolm korda päevas koju kätte toimetatud. Midagi pole enam tarvis ise külvata, kasvatada, pole tarvis küsimuste, kahtluste ja igatsuste tulel keeta. Konservid.

We have lost all feeling for one another. We can hardly control ourselves when our glance lights on the form of some other man. We are insensible, dead men, who through some trick, some dreadful magic, are still able to run and to kill.

Te? kiedyÅ› to pani czuÅ'a? - zapytaÅ'. MilczaÅ'a przez chwilÄ™. -Owszem, ale nie tak. Inaczej. Kiedy caÅ'ymi dniami nie mówiÅ'am do nikogo, a nocami spacerowaÅ'am, i wszÄ™dzie byli ludzie, którzy mieli gdzieÅ› swoje miejsce, którzy dokÄ…dÅ› chodzili, mieli gdzieÅ› swój dom. Tylko ja nie. Wtedy wszystko powoli stawaÅ'o siÄ™ nierzeczywiste, jakbym siÄ™ utopiÅ'a i szÅ'a po dnie przez jakieÅ› obce podwodne miasto...

I breathe deeply and say over to myself: - 'You are at home. You are at home.' But a sense of strangeness will not leave me, I cannot feel at home amongst these things . . . I am not myself there. There is a distance, a veil between us.

No one will understand us – because in front of us there is a generation of men who did, it is true, share the years out here with us, but who already had a bed and a job and who are going back to their old positions, where they will forget all about the war – and behind us, a new generation is growing up, one like we used to be, and that generation will be strangers to us and will push us aside.

We loved our country as much as they; we went courageously into every action; but also we distinguished the false from true, we had suddenly learned to see. And we saw that there was nothing of their world left. We were all at once terribly alone; and alone we must see it through.

Cans. We don't have to think anymore. Everything is premeditated, pre-chewed, pre-felt. Cans. All you have to do is open them. Delivered to your home three times a day. Nothing any more to cultivate yourself, or let grow and boil on the fire of questions, of doubt, and of desire. Cans.

Er war in der Stimmung eines Menschen, der nachmittags geschlafen hat und es nicht gewohnt ist – herausgefallen aus allen Beziehungen und reif für einen raschen, sinnlosen Selbstmord.

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