Quotes About Interconnectedness

The atmosphere, the earth, the water and the water cycle - those things are good gifts. The ecosystems, the ecosphere, those are good gifts. We have to regard them as gifts because we couldn't make them. We have to regard them as good gifts because we couldn't live without them.

One who neglects or disregards the existence of earth, air, fire, water and vegetation disregards his own existence which is entwined with them.

If you can feel that Mother Earth is in you, and you are Mother Earth, then you are not any longer afraid to die because the earth is not dying. Like a wave appears and disappears and appears again.

You're not a wave, you're a part of the ocean.

Just as the wave cannot exist for itself, but is ever a part of the heaving surface of the ocean, so must I never live my life for itself, but always in the experience which is going on around me.

What is essential - the one thing that could stop us being coarsened to other lives - is that we feel a great, living wave of animal life all around us, covering the earth.

The universe itself was created by the sound waves which that almighty created. So music and spirituality go together. Everything is interconnected.

If there's one thing that 2009 showed us, it's that everything is happening everywhere, across multiple platforms, each one making waves that end up crashing against each other and commingling into one giant media sea.

Coffee connects us in so many ways - to each other, to our senses, and to the earth that supports the coffee trees.

The world is getting smaller and smaller every day. We cannot find ourselves dependent on somebody who is untrustworthy.

Life is relationship, living is relationship. We cannot live if you and I have built a wall around ourselves and just peep over that wall occasionally. Unconsciously, deeply, under the wall, we are related.

We cannot comprehend what comprehends us.

No one will do for you what you need to do for yourself. We cannot afford to be separate. We have to see that all of us are in the same boat.

We are evolving as one species - not only as Americans, Syrians, Russians, Chinese, and jihadists. We cannot attack one without inflicting forms of violence and destruction upon ourselves. This is our new reality.

Perhaps if we all subscribed to the African concept of Ubuntu - that we all become people through other people, and that we cannot be fully human alone, we could learn a lot. There'd be less hatred and more harmony.

We cannot understand our humanity just by studying individuals.

By cultivating rich social networks, by cultivating weak ties, not just close ties but the weak ties, by becoming connectors and by connecting others so that they connect us, we create a world in which these self-amplifying feedback loops feed on top of each other.

As soon as you concern yourself with the 'good' and 'bad' of your fellows, you create an opening in your heart for maliciousness to enter. Testing, competing with, and criticizing others weaken and defeat you.

Everybody I interacted with in my life, directly or indirectly, has placed a fingerprint upon my life. That combination has made me who I am.

As chief scientist, it's sort of my job to look at bridges between what we do and to see the connections. But when we try to understand how are planets around other stars habitable... to looking back at the Earth - how are the changes that are taking place, how are they going to affect humanity?

From a planning perspective, economic degradation begets environmental degradation, which begets social degradation.

As a biologist, I can't think of myself as anything but an animal among animals and plant.

Basically, the intersection between the animal world and the plant world is where life regenerates itself over and over, billions of times each day. It's the foundation of life on our planet.

I think humans have to learn a new way of dwelling on this earth. A way of living with their companions: animals, plants and fish.