Quotes About Community

For all the law is fulfilled in one word, even in this; Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. -Galatians 5:14

For a year afterward the children ran to hide themselves whenever a car backfired or a plane was flying overhead, screaming, "The FBIs are coming.

The power of sisterhood is not war-power. There have been and will be conflicts, but the Final cause causes no by conflict but by attraction.

When it comes down to it, I don't have much in the way of advice to offer you, but here it is: Read to children. Vote. And never buy anything from a man who's selling fear.

It is only partly true that religion does more harm than good in society. The community makes God into the image it wants, vengeful, or milky sweet, or scrupulously just, and so on.

I am convinced that living in an enclave shapes the personality, and living alone shapes the personality too.

Religion can make it worse. Are you supposing that if people were encouraged to believe in a transcendent reality, and to be encouraged by grand rituals and music and preaching, to love their neighbors, then they would put jealousy and frustration aside?

And I'm clueless as to why Southern lesbians are always growing up queer-gorgeous-and-damned-funny, except that maybe things are a lot different in the South.

When I became a Christian as a teenager, I gathered a false belief to myself that my Christian friends would be my forever friends. Surely, since we both loved Jesus and followed Him, we would always be in each other's lives. No one would hurt the other -- because Jesus! It didn't take long for that theory of mine to be tested by reality.

When I've been in my dramatic states, friends who look beyond my spiraling downward are quick (and kind) to remind me of what is good in my life. They tell me the truth. This world is not all about me, nor am I just about to slip off the precipice of sadness. They help me see the blessings in the mess, the beauty underlying the mayhem. And when I have a dramatic friend, I can also offer this same perspective.

The church is not a place for perfection. It is, and should be, a haven of protection.

As I look back over my mountains of growth and compare them to the molehills where I stagnated, community often made the difference.

This same Jesus, though, didn't say we had to be in relationship with everyone. We are not to 'throw [our] pearls to pigs.' (See Matthew 7:6.) He didn't deeply entrust his heart to Pharisees. You see him slipping through the throng of people bent on killing him. Often he withdrew from crowds in order to be with his Father. His is a story of connection with others, yes, but it's also a reminder that relationships don't come with an easy-to-understand blueprint.

And yet, when we stopped at the last hamlet and I saw him embrace the elders and leave gifts, saw the hope that he left behind, and remembered it was he who had saved Kaden from the savagery of his own kind, I wondered if anything I felt in my gut really mattered.

Not that either he or Kaden was lazy. They were both always eager to pitch in, Kaden fixing the wheel on Berdi's wagon without any prompting, and Rafe proving himself as an experienced farmhand, clearing the trenches in Berdi's vegetable garden and repairing its sticky sluice gate. Gwyneth and I both watched with more than a little interest as he swung the hoe and lifted heavy rocks to reinforce the channel. Perhaps,

We. Everything was we now.

Brightmist. It's one of the poorest quarters. Don't let the name fool you. Nothing bright about it. Garvin was wrong. There was at least one bright thing about it. -Jase

Hold on to each other because that is what will save you. Out of many you are one now. You are family. I look to our put-together family. Non want to be here any more than I do. We are all different. We argue. We wave our fists. But we hold each other too. We grow together, strong like the circle of trees in the valley.

There was only one person in the village who had actually known Luella Miller. That person was a woman well over eighty, but a marvel of vitality and unextinct youth.

Big cities can have big hearts.

Only dead mathematics can be taught where competition prevails: living mathematics must always be a communal possession.

The phenomenon of play is local: that is, while the phenomenon of play is universal, the experience of play is intrinsically tied to location and culture.

When people rally together to support a good cause, it shouts a second message to the community at large, that people can work unselfishly together if our eyes are on God and on those in need, rather than on our own advancement.

One of the drawbacks of upward social mobility is a sense of guilty indebtedness to the old neighborhood.