Quotes About Community

Por ir a ayudar a una vecina gravemente enferma y a sus dos niños pequeños, se ganó este comentario de un jemer rojo: «No es su deber ayudarla, al contrario, esto demuestra que todavía tiene usted piedad y sentimientos de amistad. Hay que renunciar a esos sentimientos y extirpar de su mente las inclinaciones individualistas. Y ahora, vuelva a su casa»

Aikhenvald saw Véra as a fearless guide to Vladimir on "the poetic path." She was on every count his champion. The wife of another émigré writer phrased it differently: "Everyone in the Russian community knew who and what you meant when you said 'Verochka.' It meant a boxer who went into the fight and hit and hit.

the mob and the militia — officially every man between the ages of sixteen and sixty — were one and the same.

John Willard's widow, who had cowered under the stairs after his beatings, married a Towne in 1694.

Witchcraft tied up loose ends, accounting for the arbitrary, the eerie, and the unneighborly.

Everyone Has Wisdom Enough to Manage the Affairs of His Neighbors

the Nurses had raised a Quaker orphan;

A human being, appearances to the contrary, doesn't create his own purposes. These are imposed by the time he's born into; he may serve them, he may rebel against them, but the object of his service or rebellion comes from the outside. To experience complete freedom in seeking his purposes he would have to be alone, and that's impossible, since a person who isn't brought up among people cannot become a person.

The three core principles of Goddess religion are immanence, interconnection, and community.

The next best thing to being wise oneself is to live in a circle of those who are. —C. S. Lewis, Selected Literary Essays

E per noi ogni giorno è prezioso. E abbiamo i racconti. E sappiamo riparare le cose, voi no. E anche se il vento ci soffia contro, abbiamo sempre mangiato pane e tempesta, e passeremo anche questa.

Quando c'è una difficoltà non è indispensabile saper fare grandi cose, basta che uno abbia coraggio e faccia la cosa che sa fare» disse Salvo. «Ognuno di noi deve sognare di fare grandi cose, ed essere unico e cercare di diventare speciale, ma ci sarà sempre il momento in cui gli servirà l'aiuto di qualcuno» disse Miriam.

On the North American plains in the 1930s, a Kiowa Indian woman commented to a researcher that "a woman can always get another husband, but she has only one brother.

In Europe and the United States today such an arrangement would be a surefire recipe for jealousy, bitter breakups, and very mixed-up kids. But among the Bari people this practice was in the best interests of the child. The secondary fathers were expected to provide the child with fish and game, with the result that a child with a secondary father was twice as likely to live to the age of fifteen as a brother or sister without such a father.32

Couples in the Paleolithic world would never have fantasized about running off by themselves to their own little retreats in the forest. No Stone Age lovers would have imagined in their wildest dreams that they could or should be "everything" to each other. That way lay death.

the San Francisco departed, eighty-odd members of local Gold Coast communities had been offered as commodities in exchange for the goods the ship delivered, and had now become cargo themselves, en route toward the slave market at Cartagena.29

The cultural tools people employ to make sense of displacement are the means by which migrants guard against that shattering or implosion of self and attachment. Without these tools, the disruption of migration leaves disintegration in its wake that neither the individual immigrant nor the community of immigrants can bear.

and at the end of decades there they are tea splashing clove strong from chipped cups long skirts swaying around ankles giggling from folding chairs in the town square singing along dancing to the didgeridoo a joint passing between their smeared pink lips leaning safe into the only arms they've ever trusted all the way to the goddamn end

Libraries should be the beating heart of the school, not mausoleums for dusty books.

Not only are we inescapably alone in the realms of our private thoughts, perceptions and feelings, but we are also, paradoxically, inescapably together in a world with others.

Loneliness is not only positively characterized by a certain degree of isolation, but is negatively characterized by a deficiency of participation.

of the monastic institutions on which it depended. Since celibate monks tended to

A Buddhist community—a sangha—is not something one is merely born into or chooses to join but something one is challenged to create. A sangha provides a matrix of communal support for people to realize their commitment to a common vision or concer? Yet it is always in danger of deteriorating into an institution intent on preserving the power of a minority of professionals.

For a while I hoped that Buddhism Without Beliefs might stimulate more public debate and inquiry among Buddhists about these issues, but this did not happen. Instead, it revealed a fault line in the nascent Western Buddhist community between traditionalists, for whom such doctrines are non-negotiable truths, and liberals, like myself, who tend to see them more as contingent products of historical circumstance.