Quotes About Connection

As Cicero said about the merits of friendship—but he could just as well have been talking about close relationships in general—it "improves happiness and abates misery, by the doubling of our joy and the dividing of our grief." I would prefer that those who care about me greet my panic with calm and my gloom with good cheer.

It's not that empathy itself automatically leads to kindness. Rather, empathy has to connect to kindness that already exists.

Empathy is the act of coming to experience the world as you think someone else does.

Smith organizes her own book, The Power of Meaning, around four themes that show up in this summary: Belonging: connecting to and bonding with other people Purpose: finding something worthwhile Storytelling: narratives that bring order to life Transcendence: mystical experiences of self-loss

Compassion is feeling for and not feeling with the other.

On a teaching assignment of a one-week module in Nigeria, I asked my class to evaluate the class experience. One of the pastors responded, "You have come to us, stayed with us and eaten our food." He made no mention of my teaching! Instead, he saw me as part of the family.

Perhaps "staying connected to history" challenges me because I am an American with an ingrained American worldview. We Americans tend to think mostly about the present or the future and very little about our connection to the past. I don't even know my great-grandfather's name. A friend in Lebanon can trace his lineage back to the Phoenicians in 300 B.c.!

Fasting clears away the thousand little things which quickly accumulate and clutter the body, mind and heart. It cuts through corrosion and renews our contract with God and Mother Earth.

Compassion is the highest moral value, the noblest human feeling, the purest creature-love. It is the extreme social expression of the divine soul of man. Because he is able to share his feelings, where both are in reality connected in harmony by the presence of this soul in each one. One consequence of this habit of compassion is that an immense understanding of human nature fills his entire being.

How can he have fears for his future who knows that he is related to God, and that God is the same yesterday, and today, and forever?

What we were in the past is not important. What we are now is important. What we intend to make of ourselves in the future is vitally important. The unity between our character and our destiny is inseparable; the connection between our way of thinking and the course of events is unerring.

O, when I am safe in my sylvan home, I tread on the pride of Greece and Rome; And when I am stretched beneath the pines, Where the evening star so holy shines, I laugh at the lore and the pride of man, At the sophist schools and the learned clan; For what are they all, in their high conceit, When man in the bush with God may meet. —Ralph Waldo Emerson.

The practice of extending love towards all living creatures brings on ecstatic states of cosmic joy. In this intently concentrated state he (the meditator) has the power to send beneficent thoughts over land or sea to a distant person and let them penetrate his mind.

No sermon I have heard or read touched my heart with half the force of this puppet show. John Quincy Adams

The landscape thinks itself in me, and I am its consciousness.

To my mind, one does not put oneself in place of the past, one only adds a new link.

The devotional spirit is not less intense among, the pagans of the prairie than it was among the ancient Israelites and the early Christians.[128]

Internet: absolute communication, absolute isolation.

Ich bin du,wenn ich ich bin.

I know, I know and you know, we knew, we did not know, we were there, after all, and not there and at times when only the void stood between us we got all the way to each other.

You Were My Death You were my death: you I could hold when all fell away from me.

I am not sure the language I write in is spoken here, or anywhere.

What threw us together, scare-scatters, a worldstone, sun-distant, hums.

U izvoru tvojih o?iju more drži svoju rije?. Ja ondje bacam srce koje je boravilo kod ljudi.