Quotes About Community

La aldea tenía una pobre calle, una pobre fábrica de cerveza, una pobre curtiduría, una pobre taberna, un pobre establo donde se albergaban los caballos de posta, una pobre fuente y pobres habitantes.

A multitude of people and yet a solitude.

No one can sincerely try to help another without helping himself.

Thus, "the full meaning of freedom [is] the gift of self in service to God and one's brethren."34

We are all here to contribute our gifts toward something greater than ourselves, and will never be content unless we are.

Is it too much to ask, to live in a world where our human gifts go toward the benefit of all? Where our daily activities contribute to the healing of the biosphere and the well-being of other people?

We are not just a skin-encapsulated ego, a soul encased in flesh. We are each other and we are the world.

It is the cry of the separate self, 'What about me?' As long as we keep acting from that place, it doesn't matter who wins the war against (what they see as) evil. The world will not deviate from its death-spiral.

The holistic acupuncturist and the sea turtle rescuer may not be able to explain the feeling, 'We are serving the same thing,' but they are. Both are in service to an emerging story of the People that is the defining mythology of a new kind of civilization.

Each experience of love nudges us toward the Story of Interbeing, because it only fits into that story and defies the logic of Separation.

Of all the things that human beings make and do for each other, it is the unquantifiable ones that contribute most to human happiness.

We are starving for spiritual nourishment. We are starving for a life that is personal, connected, and meaningful. By choice, that is where we will direct our energy. When we do so, community will arise anew because this spiritual nourishment can only come to us as a gift, as part of a web of gifts in which we participate as giver and receiver. Whether or not it rides the vehicle of something bought, it is irreducibly personal and unique.

We are realizing our own inseparability from each other and from the totality of all life. Usury belies this union, for it seeks growth of the separate self at the expense of something external, something other.

We cannot expect a miserable, oppressed populace to exercise much care for anything outside its immediate survival and security. While the poor are kept in a state of survival anxiety through sheer deprivation, the rich suffer poverty of another kind: lack of community, connection, meaning, and intimacy, which can cause severe psychological stress even in conditions of material plenty.

To be truly seen and heard, to be truly known, is a deep human need. Our hunger for it is so omnipresent, so much a part of our experience of life, that we no more know what it is we are missing than a fish knows it is wet.

The commoditization of social relationships leaves us with nothing to do together but to consume. Joint consumption does nothing to build community because it requires no gifts.

Competition and the accumulation of more than one needs are the natural response to a perceived scarcity of resources. The obscene overconsumption and waste of our society arise from our poverty: the deficit of being that afflicts the discrete and separate self, the scarcity of money in an interest-based system, the poverty of relationship that comes from the severance of our ties to community and to nature, the relentless pressure to do anything, anything at all, to make a living.

Ultimately, what economics attempts to measure, underneath money, is the totality of all that human beings make and do for each other.

This book proclaims a revolution of a wholly different sort. It is a revolution in our very sense of self and, as a consequence, in our relationship to the world and each other. It will not and cannot arrive through a violent overthrow of the present regime, but only through its obsolescence

if everyone focused their love, care, and commitment to protecting and regenerating their local places, while respecting the local places of others, then a side effect would be the resolution of the climate crisis.

The truth is, has always been, and always will be that we are utterly and hopelessly dependent on each other and on nature. Nor

We can't all be Washingtons, but we can all be patriots.

Pride entices us to favor people who build up our egos. Everyone wants to feel accepted and loved. The best way to rid your life of pride is to surround yourself with people who care for you for the right reasons and not just to stroke your ego. Pride is

Few people enjoy associating with angry people...As a result, angry people are increasingly alone and not included, invited or involved. This isolating effect makes many angry people even angrier...Over time, the angry person finds himself or herself intensely lonely.