Quotes About Connection

The eternal quest of the individual human being is to shatter his loneliness.

If something comes to life in others because of you, then you have made an approach to immortality.

Just as there is no loss of basic energy in the universe, so no thought or action is without its effects, present or ultimate, seen or unseen, felt or unfelt.

Laughter is a powerful way to tap positive emotions

Belief becomes biology.

For children to know and regulate their emotions, and be socially connected, they need to experience this kind of interaction many hundreds of times in the critical period and then to have it reinforced later in life.

Not only does the brain send signals to the body to influence it; the body sends signals to the brain to affect it as well, and thus there is constant, two-way communication between them. The body abounds with neurons, the gut alone having 100 million. Only in anatomy textbooks is the brain isolated from the body and confined to the head.

To find a friend one must close one eye - to keep him, two.

We realize how dangerous and painful life is if we don't open up. We know we have to do it. And as soon as we start to try, we realize immediately that there is no way that we could ever do this alone, because opening up means opening to what's around us, to others, to the world, and to our radical connectedness.

We now see that the only way that we could love ourselves is by loving others, and the only way that we could truly love others is to love ourselves. The difference between self-love and love of others is very small, once we really understand.

When we sit we recognize the crucial, divine importance of absolutely everything that arises—every thought, every feeling, every breath, every unspeakable, unnameable impulse. But also we recognize the ultimate importance of the others—of the sky, of all the sounds inside and outside the room. As the mind becomes a little more quiet the sacredness of everything within and without becomes clear to us.

Meditation is doing what you are doing - whether you are doing formal meditation or child care.

Real empathy requires that we develop the capacity to put our own concerns aside long enough to notice what someone else is going through internally, without reference to ourselves.

Spiritual awakening is exactly dropping the sense of one's narrow separateness; it is essentially and profoundly altruistic.

But the whole point of mind training is to promote, to the bottom of our hearts, down to our bones, even to the marrow, the understanding and the feeling that we are not alone in this sadly poignant situation. We are together in it with everyone else. And that makes it beautiful, and even joyful, no matter how hard it may get.

No one achieves wealth and power exclusively through his or her own efforts. You can pull yourself up by your bootstraps, but someone gave you the boots.

Food, like a loving touch or a glimpse of divine power, has that ability to comfort.

I am looking for the people who have always been there, and belong to the places they live. The others I do not wish to see.

Scholars, I plead with you, Where are your dictionaries of the wind, the grasses?

Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it.

Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world's great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs. I am haunted by waters.

We can love completely what we cannot completely understand.

It is those we live with and love and should know who elude us.

Slowly we became silent, and silence itself if an enemy to friendship.