Home > All Quotes > Living in Harmony > Living in Community
These quotes are part of the compilation Living in Harmony. Sections include: Foundation Building (Developing a Spiritual Life, Living Fully in Our Bodies, Inviting Nature into Our Lives), Mindful Living (Living Mindfully Each Day, Blooming into Ourselves, Simplifying, Living Out Our Inner Vision, Living Out Our Global Vision) and Living in Community.
Our true destiny...is a world built from the bottom up by competent citizens living in solid communities, engaged in and by their places. David W. Orr
It is not more bigness that should be our goal. We must attempt, rather, to bring people back to...the warmth of community, to the worth of individual effort and responsibility...and of individuals working together as a community, to better their lives and their children's future. Robert F. Kennedy
Each of us must rededicate ourselves to serving the common good. We are a community. Our individual Fates are linked; our futures intertwined; and if we act in that knowledge and in that spirit together, as the Bible says: "We can move mountains." Jimmy Carter
Properly speaking, global thinking is not possible... Look at one of those photographs of half the earth taken from outer space, and see if you recognize your neighborhood. The right local questions and answers will be the right global ones. The Amish question, what will this do to our community? tends toward the right answer for the world. Wendell Berry
We become human only in the company of other human beings. And this involves both opening our hearts and giving voice to our deepest convictions. ...When we shrink from the world, our souls shrink, too. Paul Rogat Loeb
We have all known the long loneliness and we have learned that the only solution is love and that love comes with community. Dorothy Day
When I am with a group of human beings committed to hanging in there through both the agony and the joy of community, I have a dim sense that I am participating in a phenomenon for which there is only one word...."glory." M. Scott Peck
The world of life, of spontaneity, the world of dawn and sunset and starlight, the world of soil and sunshine, of meadow and woodland, of hickory and oak and maple and hemlock and pineland forests, of wildlife dwelling around us, of the river and its wellbeing--all of this [is] the integral community in which we live. Thomas Berry
It would be well, perhaps, if we were to spend more of our days and nights without any obstruction between us and the celestial bodies, if the poet did not speak so much from under a roof, or the saint dwell there so long. Birds do not sing in caves, nor do doves cherish their innocence in dovecots. Henry David Thoreau
Each of us is a living system within a greater living system, connected to each other in more ways than we can fathom. Paul H. Ray and Sherry Ruth Anderson
After decades of faithful study, ecologists have begun to fathom hidden likenesses among many interwoven systems. ...a canon of nature's laws, strategies, and principles...
Nature runs on sunlight.
Nature uses only the energy it needs.
Nature fits form to function.
Nature recycles everything.
Nature rewards cooperation.
Nature banks on diversity.
Nature demands local expertise.
Nature curbs excesses from within.
Nature taps the power of limits. Janine M. Benyus
Our fulfillment is not in our isolated human grandeur, but in our intimacy with the larger earth community, for this is also the larger dimension of our being. Thomas Berry
We are called to assist the Earth to heal her wounds and in the process heal our own - indeed, to embrace the whole creation in all its diversity, beauty and wonder. This will happen if we see the need to revive our sense of belonging to a larger family of life, with which we have shared our evolutionary process. Wangari Maathai
The seven of us on board [the Space Shuttle] represented five different religions. But we were all agreed - it just doesn't make sense how people on earth treat each other. It doesn't make any difference what language we speak. It doesn't make any difference what country we come from. It certainly doesn't make any difference what the color of our skin is. We are all children of God traveling on spaceship earth together. Jake Garn
One day our descendants will think it incredible that we paid so much attention to things like the amount of melanin in our skin or the shape of our eyes or our gender instead of the unique identities of each of us as complex human beings. Franklin Thomas
Man is a part of the world, and his spirit is part of the spirit of the world. We are merely a peculiar mode of Being, a living atom within it, or, rather, a cell that, if sufficiently open to itself and its own mystery, can also experience the mystery, the will, the pain, and the hope of the world. Vàclav Havel
All men are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Whoever degrades another degrades me,
And whatever is done or said returns at last to me. Walt Whitman
All of our humanity is dependent upon recognizing the humanity in others. Desmond Tutu
The golden way is to be friends with the world and to regard the whole human family as one. Mahatma Gandhi
Perhaps the most poignant image of our time is that of Earth as seen by the space voyagers: a blue sphere, shimmering with life and light, alone and unique in the cosmos. From this perspective, the maps of geopolitics vanish, and the underlying interconnectedness of all the components of this extraordinary living system - animal, plant, water, land, and atmosphere - becomes strikingly evident. Richard Benedick
A human being is part of the whole, called by us "universe," a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separate from the rest - a kind of optical delusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. Albert Einstein
With all things and in all things, we are relatives. Native American (Sioux) Proverb
Relation is the essence of everything that exists. Meister Eckhart
Love all God's creation, the whole of it and every grain of sand. Love every leaf, every ray of God's light! Love the animals, love the plants, love everything. If you love everything, you will perceive the divine mystery in things. And once you have perceived it, you will begin to comprehend it ceaselessly, more and more every day. And you will at last come to love the whole world with an abiding, universal love. Fyodor Mikhail Dostoyevski
I live my life in widening circles
That reach out across the world. Rainer Maria Rilke
