Community Quotes
905 quotes
"Pull up a chair. Take a taste. Come join us. Life is so endlessly delicious."
"What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured."
"No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were: any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee."
"Educate a boy, and you educate an individual. Educate a girl, and you educate a community."
"The world is so empty if one thinks only of mountains, rivers & cities; but to know someone who thinks & feels with us, & who, though distant, is close to us in spirit, this makes the earth for us an inhabited garden."
"Once you educate the boys, they tend to leave the villages and go search for work in the cities, but the girls stay home, become leaders in the community, and pass on what they’ve learned. If you really want to change a culture, to empower women, improve basic hygiene and health care, and fight high rates of infant mortality, the answer is to educate girls."
"The single greatest lesson the garden teaches is that our relationship to the planet need not be zero-sum, and that as long as the sun still shines and people still can plan and plant, think and do, we can, if we bother to try, find ways to provide for ourselves without diminishing the world."
"A library outranks any other one thing a community can do to benefit its people. It is a never failing spring in the desert."
"We have all known the long loneliness and we have learned that the only solution is love and that love comes with community."
"A #startup is as fragile as a flower, and it needs a garden and a gardener to help it grow. Those gardens are called Business Incubators."
"Love is our most unifying and empowering common spiritual denominator. The more we ignore its potential to bring greater balance and deeper meaning to human existence, the more likely we are to continue to define history as one long inglorious record of man’s inhumanity to man."
"To like many people spontaneously and without effort is perhaps the greatest of all sources of personal happiness."
"Beauty is not who you are on the outside, it is the wisdom and time you gave away to save another struggling soul, like you."
"Remember that the happiest people are not those getting more, but those giving more."
"We need to bridge our sense of loneliness and disconnection with a sense of community and continuity even if we must manufacture it from our time on the Web and our use of calling cards to connect long distance. We must “log on” somewhere, and if it is only in cyberspace, that is still far better than nowhere at all. (264)"
"If you teach a boy, you educate an individual; but if you teach a girl, you educate a community."
"Men are free when they are obeying some deep, inward voice of religious belief. Obeying from within. Men are free when they belong to a living, organic, believing community, active in fulfilling some unfulfilled, perhaps unrealized purpose. Not when they are escaping to some wild west. The most unfree souls go west, and shout of freedom."
"Teaching kids how to feed themselves and how to live in a community responsibly is the center of an education."
"Happiness is good, but well-overrated: what we hate most are the very motivators that put us in gear. A man drifts along with little to contribute until something agitates him enough to make a difference, whether for himself or for his communities."
"We live in a community of people not so that we can suppress and dominate eachother or make each other miserable but so that we can better and more reliably satisfy all life's healthy needs."
"In order to survive, a plurality of true communities would require not egalitarianism and tolerance but knowledge, an understanding of the necessity of local differences, and respect. Respect, I think, always implies imagination - the ability to see one another, across our inevitable differences, as living souls. (pg. 181, Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community)"
"Integrity is a powerful force, keeping you alive to others long after you’ve left their presence."
"When individuals and communities do not govern self, they risk being ruled by external forces that care less about the well-being of the village."
"I grew up in libraries, and I hope I've learned never to take them for granted. A thriving library is the heart of its community, providing access to information and educational opportunities, bringing people together, leveling the playing field, and archiving our history."
"Many people seek fellowship because they are afraid to be alone...let him who cannot be alone beware of community. He will do harm to himself and to the community. Alone you stood before God when he called you; alone you had to answer that call; alone you had to struggle and pray; and alone you will die and give an account to God. You cannot escape yourself, for God has singled you out."
"Lovelessness is a huge sin in the church. The four primary personalities in the New Testament- Jesus, Paul, Peter, and John- all four of them say that love is the most important thing. But the only time love really counts is when something unlovely happens."
"The real education is when you awaken and nourish and guide the inner spirit, this inner genius. The community grows from the giving of the gifts of the people in it, which is really giving from the genius."
"Shalom is communal, holistic, and tangible. There is no private or partial shalom. The whole community must have shalom or no one has shalom. As long as there are hungry people in a community that is well fed, there can be no shalom. . . . Shalom is not for the many, while a few suffer; nor is it for the few while many suffer. It must be available for everyone."
"Walking through suffering is a work that is bound by limitation. Often it isn't that the afflicted are unwilling to let others in. It is just that there comes a certain point in a person's suffering where there is no apparent port of entry."
Russ Ramsey, Struck: One Christian's Reflections on Encountering Death
"I want to bring out the best in a community and contribute something of permanent value."
"A man's value to the community depends primarily on how far his feelings, thoughts, and actions are directed towards promoting the good of his fellows."
"Personal value is the kind of value we receive from being active instead of passive, creative instead of consumptive."
Clay Shirky, Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age
"How we treat one another matters, and not just in a "it's nice to be nice" kind of way: our behavior contributes to an environment that encourages some opportunities and hinders others."
Clay Shirky, Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age
"Public and civic value require commitment and hard work among the core group of participants. It also requires that these groups be self-governing and submit to constraints that help them ignore distracting and entertaining material and stay focused instead of some sophisticated task."
Clay Shirky, Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age
"This work is not easy, and it never goes smoothly. Because we are hopelessly committed to both individual and group effectiveness, groups committed to public or civic value are rarely permanent. Instead, groups need to acquire a culture that rewards their members for doing that hard work. It takes this kind of group effort to get what we need, not just what we want; understanding how to create and maintain is one of the great challenges of our era."
Clay Shirky, Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age
"People want to do something to make the world a better place. They will help when they are invited to."
"I believe that the community - in the fullest sense: a place and all its creatures - is the smallest unit of health and that to speak of the health of an isolated individual is a contradiction in terms. (pg. 146, Health is Membership)"
Wendell Berry, The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays
"Every cult of personality that emphasizes the distinguished qualities, virtues, and talents of another person, even though these be of an altogether spiritual nature, is worldly and has no place in the Christian community; indeed, it poisons the Christianity community."
"But many of us seek community solely to escape the fear of being alone. Knowing how to be solitary is central to the art of loving. When we can be alone, we can be with others without using them as a means of escape."
"A forest is not a wilderness, but a community of souls who speak to one another on the wind."
"[I]n Africa I was a member of a family—of a sort of family that the people of your culture haven't known for thousands of years. If gorillas were capable of such an expression, they would tell you that their family is like a hand, of which they are the fingers. They are fully aware of being a family but are very little aware of being individuals. Here in the zoo there were other gorillas—but there was no family. Five severed fingers do not make a hand."
"There is more for us to gain through love than hate."
Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem
"Once again, we are reminded that awakening, or enlightenment is not the property of Buddhism, any more than Truth is the property of Christianity. Neither the Buddha nor the Christ belongs exclusively to the communities that were founded in their names. They belong to all people of goodwill, all who are attentive to the secret which lives in the depths of their breath and their consciousness. (14)"
Jean-Yves Leloup, Compassion and Meditation: The Spiritual Dynamic between Buddhism and Christianity
"Until a man love God, can he love his neighbour."
"If you have committed all things to impacting a life at a time, or impacting a community or society, then welcome to a life of significance."
"You can be in the vanguard of those that bring a change to the community and to the nation as a whole."
"A person could waste an important part of his living if he refuses to come into significance; if he refuses to impact lives around, the family and in the community or in the society."
"The principles of godliness must be ensured to be received by all in the community, city and the nation, even by the young and old."
"Everybody is a story. When I was a child, people sat around kitchen tables and told their stories. We don't do that so much anymore. Sitting around the table telling stories is not just a way of passing time. It is the way the wisdom gets passed along. The stuff that helps us to live a life worth remembering."
"People need each other. Our well-being is tightly tethered to the well-being of people we do not know, most of whom look nothing like ourselves. Happiness, I realized right there in breathing class, requires engagement."
Paula Poundstone, The Totally Unscientific Study of the Search for Human Happiness
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