Quotes About Community

on having dinner with us.

Mangan ora mangan sing penting CONNECT!

I want to share all of my New York with you, Melissa. My house, my friends, my life. It's not just about where you live, what you have. It's about who you are with. I know you get that, and I can't tell what it means to me.

For one's native place is the shell of one's soul, and one's church is the kernel of that nut.

los bárbaros construyen sus casas separadas, y los hombres civilizados, juntas.

I don't want to sound cliché or corny or anything, but Black men and women have always been pitted against each other.We've been made to believe so many lies about each other, and that's why I think our loving each other, whether it's expressed through friendship or marriage or both, is a revolutionary act. It means that we're able to see and accept the truth in each other, and in ourselves.

Maybe it's not a choice between the two of them. Maybe there's a third choice. Or a fourth or a fifth. Or maybe it's not about having a guy right now. Maybe it's just about having friends.

You must be lonely. Only when I'm with other people.

Our duty, he said, is to catapult each other into greatness! We are not great yet, but at least we sometimes experience moments of immeasurable glee. At least we are not wholly miserable every minute of the day, and we know we have made one another into what we are today.

We were all like a gaggle of hermit crabs without shells, flopping around trying to find ourselves. Instead we found each other, and that's just as good, I guess.

the real achievement isn't getting out of the place where you were born to build a new identity for yourself. It's better to stay put and change the culture—genuinely transform—where you are.

around the country, fill your belly well Ã¢â'¬â€

These evolutionary achievements were incremental steps toward multicellularity. Colonies of single-celled organisms could be sieved apart, then, if given freedom, were (and still are) able to reconstruct their shattered community.

We mammals are uncannily good at gravitating toward those who share our hidden joys and woes. This talent for emotional homing crops up among beavers, wolves, and even deer.

Humans are much the same.20 Children whose gifts or disabilities make them seem bizarre, for example, manage to find each other and to congregate.21 Among our kind it's called validation. Without others on our wavelength the strangeness of our emotions can make us feel we're losing our minds.

As time went on, the meaning of "tribe" was no longer clamped entirely to birth. Newcomers to a Greek city were often assigned a tribe at random—no matter who their forefathers might have been. But once you had your tribal label, it was unchangeable. Despite vocational liberties, preordained identities still stuck to you like glue.

From the beginning, we've been yanked together by the tug of sociality. Three and a half billion years ago, our earliest cellular ancestors, bacteria, evolved in colonies. Each bacterium couldn't live without the comfort of rubbing against its neighbors.

When you snatch chimps, dogs, laboratory mice, and a wide variety of other animals away from the group they know and love,* exhaustion overwhelms them, their immune system downshifts, and they begin to waste away.

At the same time, Europe's long-dead postal service was resumed. Now Erasmus could become a snail-mail junkie, using a stream of letters24 to unite a community of international eccentrics into a movement which downgraded religion's death ride to heaven and exalted earthly humanity. The moment was appropriate. For the first time since the rise of multicellularity, there was no longer just one global brain but two—one microbial, the other that of man- and womankind.

Inner-judges measure our contribution to the social learning machine by two yardsticks: (1) our personal sense of mastery; and (2) the hints we get from those around us telling us whether they want us eagerly or couldn't care less if we disappeared like a blackhead from the face of decent society.

Roughly 130,000 years ago,1 the diversity generator of creative bickering drove tribes to run an artificial crease down their centers, sorting shoulder-rubbing neighbors into two opposing groups. These primordial forms of fabricated cleavage, known to anthropologists as moieties, were apparently a way to keep the deformities of inbreeding at bay.

We have everywhere an absence of memory. Architects sometimes talk of building with context and continuity in mind, religious leaders call it tradition, social workers say it's a sense of community, but it is memory we have banished from our cities. We have speed and power, but no place. Travel, but no destination. Convenience, but no ease.

Remember: You'll be left with an empty feeling if you hit the finish line alone. When you run a race as a team, though, you'll discover that much of the reward comes from hitting the tape together. You want to be surrounded not just by cheering onlookers but by a crowd of winners, celebrating as one.

There are two questions that we have to ask ourselves. The 1st is Where am I going? and the 2nd is Who will go with me? If you ever get these questions in the wrong order , you are in trouble.