Quotes About Community

L'abitante di un villaggio mi scrutava Disperato eppure senza paura, Risponde: "Odio entrambe le fazioni. Non ne seguo nessuna. Voglio solo andare Dove mi lascino vivere E i aiutino a vivere". Vita ! quanta infelicità

All of living is nothing but a fervid attempt to move closer together.

To our horror, the very neighbor whom we had for decades thought of as the best natured and hardest working and, we always thought, the most contented of all our neighbors has turned out to be a murderer.

A degraded habitat will produce degraded humans. If there is to be any true progress, then the entire life community must progress.

We must, however, reflect on what is happening. It is an urgent matter, especially for those of us who still live in a meaningful, even a numinous, earth community. We have not spoken. Nor even have we seen clearly what is happening. The issue goes far beyond economics, or commerce, or poetics, or an evening of pleasantries as we look out over a scenic view. Something is happening beyond all this. We are losing splendind and intimate modes of divine presence. We are, perhaps, losing ourselves.

The Earth is so integral in the unity of its functioning that every aspect of the Earth is affected by what happens to any component member of the community. Because of its organic quality, Earth cannot survive in fragments….The integral functioning of the planet must be preserved.

It's not possible to save the world by trying to save it. You need to find what is genuinely yours to offer the world before you can make it a better place. Discovering your unique gift to bring to your community is your greatest opportunity and challenge. The offering of that gift — your true self — is the most you can do to love and serve the world. And it is all the world needs.

We must say of the universe that it is a communion of subjects, not a collection of objects. 

Were every one employed in points concordant to their natures, professions, and arts, commonwealths would rise up of themselves.

You can't create stories in a vacuum.

The study of God requires intellectual effort, historical imagination, empathic energy, and participation in a vital community of prayer (Augustine, Answer to Skeptics).

re: the green martyrs] But the saintly recluse does not intend to wall himself off from holy intercourse with his fellow humans. A little out of the way, he will still be available to those who walk the extra mile to find insight, instruction, and baptism.

The real purpose of religion—at the popular level—was to unify the populace. Let everyone worship his favorite god in some niche or other, but let's all sacrifice at the same altar, climb the same steps, and wander through the same colonnades. Let the Jews have their god, by all means—who's stopping them?—and let us all have ours. And no provincial exclusiveness, please.

Ambiance raciale : les Arméniens, vieux habitants du quartier, contribuant à sa dimension de palimpseste des peuples, augmentent mon plaisir (et mon argument) d'habiter le 10e : c'est la France que j'aime, réelle, hétérogène. Que les Arméniens puissent cohabiter tranquillement avec les Turcs, les Juifs avec les Arabes, etc., définit l'ancien idéal républicain de coexistence des contraires.

Entre la rencontre obligatoire du village (l'horreur) et l'anonymat total des mégapoles (l'enfer), Paris est la ville aux proportions justes.

What we believe is heavily influenced by what we think others believe

The perfect woman, you see [is] a working-woman; not an idler; not a fine lady; but one who [uses] her hands and her head and her heart for the good of others.

As Antigone said, I am neither a dweller among men nor ghosts.

Only a wall divided him from those happy young contemporaries of his with whom he shared a common mental life; men who had nothing to do from morning till night but to read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest. Only a wall—but what a wall!

The people who had turned their heads turned them again as the service proceeded; and at last observing her they whispered to each other. She knew what their whispers were about, grew sick at heart, and felt that she could come to church no more.

He can blow the flute very well-that 'a can,' said a young married man, who having no individuality worth mentioning was known as 'Susan Tall's husband.

The club of Marlott alone lived to uphold the local Cerealia. It had walked for hundreds of years, if not as benefit-club, as votive sisterhood of some sort; and it walked still.

a lonely leaf would occasionally spin downwards to rejoin on the grass the scathed multitude of its comrades which had preceded it in its fall.

They are simple folk. Like beasts in a field, they are fascinated when a peacock lives amongst them.