Quotes About Interdependence

The point is that you are an individual inasmuch as you exist in a social matrix of others who respect your individuality and your right to make choices. That's concrete individuality: an individuality that it owes its existence to a kind of communal respect on the part of all the other individualities, and that it had better therefore respect them similarly.

point is that you are an individual inasmuch as you exist in a social matrix of others who respect your individuality and your right to make choices. That's concrete individuality: an individuality that recognizes that it owes its existence to a kind of communal respect on the part of all the other individualities, and that it had better therefore respect them similarly.

The frog does not drink up the pond in which it lives.

If one finger brings oil it soils the others.

To upset the delicate axis of giving and receiving on which our lives are held precarious.

Bushes would pull in their sharp thorns and burst into flower when I watered them or loosened the earth around their roots. Squirrel-like creatures, their long white hair smooth as silk-thread, would scurry up to take berries from my palm.

We must take turns, don't you think? Every time one of us is buried like this, we shall dig the other out.

we can say we love each other if my life is better because you're in it and your life is better because I'm in it.

No woman is an island-ess. We fall in love in hope of anchoring ourselves to someone else, to keep from falling.

No one can survive on their own. Thinking you can is ridiculous, especially going into the middle half of the 21st century. To think you can do it alone is just ridiculous.

Just as characteristic, perhaps, is the intellectual interdependence created through the development of the modern media of communication: post, telegraph, telephone, and popular press.

All species capable of grasping this fact manage better in the struggle for existence than those which rely upon their own strength alone: the wolf, which hunts in a pack, has a greater chance of survival than the lion, which hunts alone.

A man whose mother won't let him lift a finger is ruined for a wife." The

perpetually positioning our "self" in relationship to other "selves"—

She and Jon had been startled and a little frighented by his misery. What happened when you were married, she realized, was that, although you began as two independent people, you eventually grew in certain ways to accommodate your partner's weaknesses and let other parts of you atrophy in deference to his strengths. It was a fine system as long as it endured, but if you extricated yourself from it you couldn't help but be, a least for a time, deformed.

The very fabric of our world is dependent for its existence upon the subtle and varied harmonies created by all living things. In the micro cosm of nature, loss of one sound results in dissonance, which activates in us a yearning for harmony.

By nature man without woman can feel no joy. She is his mother, his sister, his loving friend. She is seldom his enemy.

We need three basic things to live - food, clothing, and shelter. Very few of us actually grow our own food, make our own clothes, and build our own homes. If we do not fulfill our basic needs by ourselves, why do we put so much pressure on ourselves to do everything else on our own? Just what are we trying to prove?

We have built our houses between what is fluid and what is fixed.

What science does is what I would like more literature to do too: show us that we are living in an exquisitely complicated world that is not all about us. It does not belong to us alone. It never has done.

Hands are for other human hands to hold. They should not be reserved exclusively as perches for hawks. And the wild is not a panacea for the human soul; too much in the air can corrode it to nothing.

affection by trying to make things happen for the others. This puts a Giver in the uncomfortable position of having to receive. It may feel like the Eight is dominating even

For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.

The animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life, fellow prisoners of the splendor and travail of the earth.