Quotes About Connection

Of all the communities available to us there is not one that I would devote myself to, except for the society of true searchers, which has very few living members at any time.

Look deep, deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better. - Albert Einstein | Nature Quotes

Above all things let us never forget that mankind constitutes one great brotherhood; all born to encounter suffering and sorrow, and therefore bound to sympathize with each other.

I soon discovered that one doesn't simply read Crime and Punishment or A Tree Grows in Brooklyn . One reads a certain edition, a specific copy, recognizable by the roughness or the smoothness of its paper, by its scent, by a slight tear on page 72 and a coffee ring on the right-hand corner of the back cover.

One book calls to another unexpectedly, creating alliances across different cultures and centuries.

All these are readers, and their gestures, their craft, the pleasure, the responsibility and the power they derive from reading, are common with mine. I am not alone.

We read to under­stand our intu­ition of the world, to dis­cover that some­one a thou­sand miles and years away has put into words our most inti­mate desires and our most secret fears. Reading is a col­lab­o­ra­tive act.

This morning I looked at the books on my shelves and thought that they have no knowledge of my existence. They come to life because I open them and turn their pages, and yet they don't know that I am their reader.

Every reader has found charms by which to secure possession of a page that, by magic, becomes as if never read before, fresh and immaculate.

Uma biblioteca não é só um lugar de ordem e caos; também é o reino do acaso. mesmo depois de lhes atribuirmos uma prateleira e um número, os livros retêm uma mobilidade própria. Entregues a si mesmos, formam grupos inesperados; seguem regras secretas de semelhança, genealogias que nenhuma crónica regista, interesses e temas comuns.

the point, the essential quality of the act of reading, now and always, is that it tends to no foreseeable end, to no conclusion. Every reading prolongs another, begun in some afternoon thousands of years ago and of which we know nothing; every reading projects its shadow onto the following page, lending it content and context. In this way, the story grows, layer after layer, like the skin of the society whose history this act preserves.

Only when, years later, I touched for the first time my lover's body did I realize that literature could sometimes fall short of the actual event.

The books on my shelves do not know me until I open them, yet I am certain that they address me — me and every other reader — by name; they await our comments and opinions. I am presumed in Plato as I am presumed in every book, even in those I'll never read.

Lesen ist eine Erinnerungsarbeit, bei der wir durch Geschichten in den Genuss der vergangenen Erfahrungen anderer kommen, als wären es unsere eigenen.

To say "I" is to draw a circle in which writer and reader share a common existence within the margins of the page, where reality and unreality rub off each other, where words and what the words name contaminate each other.

If the Epic of Gilgamesh carries a teaching, it is that the other makes our existence possible.

What the poet tells us is that, after the ordeals and adventures, after the revelation and the loss, the king must do two things: preserve the splendor of his city and tell his own story. Both tasks are complementary: both speak of the intimate connection between building a city of walls and building a story of words, and both require, in order to be accomplished, the existence of the other.

For in spite of language, in spite of intelligence and intuition and sympathy, one can never really communicate anything to anybody.

To his dog, every man is Napoleon; hence the constant popularity of dogs.

It's a little embarrassing that after 45 years of research & study, the best advice I can give people is to be a little kinder to each other.

My father considered a walk among the mountains as the equivalent of churchgoing.

We live together, we act on, and react to, one another; but always and in all circumstances we are by ourselves. [...] By its very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude. Sensations, feelings, insights, fancies - all these are private and, except through symbols and at second hand, incommunicable.

One touches and, in the act of touching, one's touched.

When one individual comes into intimate contact with another, she—or he, of course, as the case may be—must almost inevitably receive or inflict suffering.