Quotes About Interdependence

Take away health, wealth, and material success and all you have is each other. Maybe that's the place we should start.

No one book of scripture can be understood by itself, any more than any one part of a tree or member of the body can be understood without reference to the whole of which it is a part.

everything remains inherently connected to everything else.

Most people's root networks are closing in on themselves, circling more and more tightly around spouses, partners, parents and kids. These are our most important relationships, but every arborist knows that a tree with a small root-ball is more likely to fall over when the wind blows.

Social man is not a being secure in the given nexus of familial, ritual, and political ties that hold his life together but rather a being continually engaged in creating that nexus.

She says that telling a love story is something one person does. Being in love takes both of them. Putting her on a pedestal is just a different way of being alone.

there is a circular relationship between our ability to know and love another and our ability to know and love ourselves.

Codependency is women's basic training.

We all need one another; much and often. Just as every human creature needs a place to be alone in, a sacred, private "home" of his own, so all human creatures need a place to be together in, from the two who can show each other their souls uninterruptedly, to the largest throng that can throb and stir in unison.

There is a word that is so old fashioned -- I feel compelled to dust it off just to use it in this sentence -- RECIPROCITY -- the "soul-coal" that stoked many barn raisings, harvests and roundups.

What is one boot without the other boot? It is nothing. It is useless, an orphan forevermore, and I could take no mercy on it.

Contrary to popular belief, there most certainly is an "I" in "team." It is the same "I" that appears three times in "responsibility."

Why does the orange blossom kiss the breeze? Because the breeze first kisses the orange blossom.

We are foolish, and without excuse foolish, in speaking of the "superiority" of one sex to the other, as if they could be compared in similar things. Each has what the other has not: each completes the other, and is completed by the other: they are in nothing alike, and the happiness and perfection of both depend on each asking and receiving from the other what the other only can give.

In reality, plants are farming humans — giving us oxygen until we eventually decompose so they can consume us.

What makes it so hard to organize the environment sensibly is that everything we touch is hooked up to everything else.

Whoever makes a garden Has never worked alone; the rain has always found it, The sun has always known; The wind has blown across it And helped to scatter seeds; Whoever makes a garden Has all the help he needs.

None of us got where we are solely by pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps. We got here because somebody — a parent, a teacher, an Ivy League crony or a few nuns — bent down and helped us pick up our boots.

The idea of surrender in relationship is not to another person but to the process of relationship itself.

Each of us is a being in himself and a being in society, each of us needs to understand himself and understand others, take care of others and be taken care of himself.

Man and rats are merely, so far, the most successful animals of prey. They are utterly destructive of other forms of life. Neither of them is of the slightest use to any other species of living things.

We need other people, and we need to be needed by other people, in order to be who we might be, who we yearn to be.

Our goal will be to have relationships with both men and women that do not operate at the expense of the self, and to have a self that does not operate at the expense of the other.

Separateness" does not mean emotional distance, which is simply one means of managing anxiety or emotional intensity. Rather, separateness refers to the preservation of the "I" within the "we" - the ability to acknowledge and respect differences and to achieve authenticity within the context of connectedness.