Quotes About Interconnectedness

Though debts are condemned in the financial world, the world of friendship and love may perversely depend on well-managed debts.

I am the soul brother to everything that lives, to the giraffe and to the crocodile as much as to man.

That fish taken out of the water several continents away could in a matter of hours be here in a warehouse in Northamptonshire is evidence of nothing short of logistical genius, based on a complex interplay of technology, managerial discipline and legal and economic standardisation.

The Tao does not separate, but enfolds.

To think independently of other human beings is impossible, and if it were possible it would be undesirable. Thinking is necessarily, thoroughly, and wonderfully social. Everything you think is a response to what someone else has thought and said. And when people commend someone for "thinking for herself" they usually mean "ceasing to sound like people I dislike and starting to sound more like people I approve of.

and a thousand other stories waiting to unfold, dependent on the births of children, the movement of people in the streets, the songs of birds at certain moments, the precise position of chairs, the wind.

Or perhaps cause lies forever in the past while effect in the future, but future and past are entwined.

Everything is connected.

In the heart of darkness, a flower blossoms, enriching the shadows with its promise of hope... In the fields of light, an adder coils, and the radiant tranquility is lent savor by its sinister presence. Right and wrong, black and white, good and evil...all my existence I have looked from one to the other, fully embracing neither one...never before have I understood how much they depend on each other.

We forget that nothing happens in life independently of other things.

A person is a person through other persons. None of us comes into the world fully formed. We would not know how to think, or walk, or speak, or behave as human beings unless we learned it from other human beings. We need other human beings in order to be human. I am because other people are. A person is entitled to a stable community life, and the first of these communities is the family.

A person with ubuntu is open and available to others, affirming of others, does not feel threatened that others are able and good, for he or she has a proper self-assurance that comes from knowing that he or she belongs in a greater whole and is diminished when others are humiliated or diminished, when others are tortured or oppressed.

Flowers make themselves fragrant and offer nectar. Why? To nourish the bees or to get themselves pollinated? Or both? In nature, to get you have to give. There is no charity. There is no exploitation, neither selfishness nor selflessness. One grows by helping others grow. Is that not the perfect society?

Vishnu is therefore Shrivatsa, the one whose abode is Lakshmi. Where he is, so is she.

According to the Jatakas, the Buddha was born as a frog in one of his previous lives. He saw a snake being attacked by a school of fish. The snake asked, 'Is this appropriate?' to which the frog replied, 'You eat the fish when they enter your territory. The fish attack you when you enter theirs. Considering the context,

No one person can ever take credit for a moment in this cosmos.

Dharma must not only domesticate nature, it also needs to ensure there is harmony between nature and culture.

The notion of karma is unique to Indian thought. No action exists in isolation. Every decision impacts the ecosystem. Karma is often mistaken for the adage, "As you sow, so shall you reap.

In Buddhist literature, we are told the story of the hamsa who was shot dead in front of the Buddha by a hunter. The Buddha looked at the hunter and asked, 'Can you bring it back to life?' The hunter replied, 'No, I cannot.' The Buddha then said, 'If you cannot give life, what gives you the right to take life?

Brahmana represents a state when humans have totally overpowered the animal brain; in other words, outgrown fear. We do not look at the other as predator or prey, mate or rival. We do not seek to judge the other in order to position ourselves. Our identity is not dependent on the other. It is independent, devoid of the need for props. We either withdraw as Shiva does, or engage as Vishnu does, in order to enable the insecure other, who is entrapped in a crumpled mind.

The trouble with life is that incidents so often merely follow each other rather than grow out of each other ...

Look at your feet. You are standing in the sky. When we think of the sky, we tend to look up, but the sky actually begins at the earth. We walk through it, yell into it, rake leaves, wash the dog, and drive cars in it. We breathe it deep within us. With every breath, we inhale millions of molecules of sky, heat them briefly, and then exhale them back into the world.

I'm an Earth ecstatic, and my creed is simple: All life is sacred, life loves life, and we are capable of improving our behavior toward one another. As basic as that is, for me it's also tonic and deeply spiritual, glorifying the smallest life-form and embracing the most distant stars.

Being free means "being free for the other," because the other has bound me to him. Only in relationship with the other am I free