Quotes About Interconnectedness

Rather than say art is art and life is life, I like to say that they're joined and inextricable.

Societies are not trapped by their pasts and freely borrow ideas and institutions from each other.

No man is born unto himself alone;Who lives unto himself, he lives to none.

All things by immortal power. Near of far, to each other linked are, that thou canst not stir a flower without troubling of a star.

Los seres humanos, tal como los conocemos, no son sino partes infinitesimales de un todo inmenso.

As above, so below," runs the old motto. It

We have no longer an outside and an inside as two separate things. Now the outside may come inside and the inside may and does go outside. They are of each other. Form and function thus become one in design and execution if the nature of materials and method and purpose are all in unison.

The throwing out of balance of the resources of nature throws out of balance also the lives of men.

Modern civilization has become so complex and the lives of civilized men so interwoven with the lives of other men in other countries as to make it impossible to be in this world and not of it.

We humans will be diminished if we cannot even protect the animals closest to us, who share almost all of our genes, and who differ from us only by degree.

Todos los animales mutilan o matan a otros organismos. Ni el agricultor más orgánico puede evitar perjudicar los intereses de otras formas de vida al robar el hábitat de animales salvajes, erradicar insectos con pesticidas naturales y sacrificar plantas para el consumo humano.

The more living patterns there are in a place—a room, a building, or a town—the more it comes to life as an entirety, the more it glows, the more it has that self-maintaining fire, which is the quality without a name.1 —Christopher Alexander

Our world hangs like a magnificent jewel in the vastness of space. Every one of us is a part of that jewel. A facet of that jewel. And in the perspective of infinity, our differences are infinitesimal.

You know, we have pieces of the people that have cared about us all through our lives, and they're all part of us know. And so we represent, each one of us represents, so many investments from others. No one of us is alone.

The world's full of details, have you noticed? And since no detail is ever repeated in exactly the same shape and always sets off other details, there's no end to it.

History is a living whole. If one organ be removed, it is nothing but a lifeless mass.

Nothing can be separated from everything else.

Same deal here. It's not "you" and "the universe." It's "universeyou.

The entire universe has no gaps to accommodate space." Space is not emptiness between one solid thing and another solid thing. Those solid things are

The entire universe has no gaps to accommodate space." Space is not emptiness between one solid thing and another solid thing. Those solid things are also space, or emptiness.

When you study a speck of dust thoroughly and completely, you study the entire universe.

You see that what you call "self" is the manifestation of everything. You reflect and refract the universe around you in a unique way, and that unique way is commonly called "self." But it does not belong to anyone — certainly not to you!

There is no separation between creator, creation, and created thing. You simply admit that you are an extension of the creation, a part of it, accepted by it. Eventually the effort becomes how to live within the intention of the creator. To find this out and follow this Way, is to live.

In D?gen's view everything is sacred, and to single out one specific thing, like a book or a city or a person, as being more sacred than anything else is a huge mistake.