Quotes about community

Lila Abu-Lughod - Do Muslim Women Need Saving?

What does freedom mean if we accept the fundamental premise that humans are social beings, raised in certain social and historical contexts and belonging to particular communities that shape their desires and understandings of the world?

Steven Magee -

It is a sad state of affairs that I donot know of any astronomer who fully understands the energy in their own daily environment. Untilthat changes, Dark Energy will always be a mystery to the astronomical community.

Wendell Berry - The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays

People use drugs, legal and illegal, because their lives are intolerably painful or dull. They hate their work and find no rest in their leisure. They are estranged from their families and their neighbors. It should tell us something that in healthy societies drug use is celebrative, convivial, and occasional, whereas among us it is lonely, shameful, and addictive. We need drugs, apparently, because we have lost each other.

Bryant McGill - Simple Reminders: Inspiration for Living Your Best Life

Treat others with respect and you will always be wealthy, because your community is your real currency.

Wendell Berry - The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays

Healing is impossible in loneliness; it is the opposite of loneliness. Conviviality is healing. To be healed we must come with all the other creatures to the feast of Creation.(pg.99, "The Body and the Earth")

Vironika Tugaleva -

When we suffer in silence, we think that we are alone, different, separate. When we share our stories of suffering, we find that we are the same.

Orson Scott Card - Ender's World: Fresh Perspectives on the SF Classic Ender's Game

But most of those to whom Ender's Game feels most important are those who, like me, feel themselves to be perpetually outside their most beloved communities, never able to come inside and feel confident of belonging.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer - Life Together: The Classic Exploration of Christian Community

Many persons seek community because they are afraid of loneliness...those who take refuge in community while fleeing from themselves are misuing it to indulge in empty talk and distraction, no matter how spiritual this idle talk and distraction may appear...it is precisely such misuse of community that creates deadly isolation of human beings.

Sherry Turkle - Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other

We go from curiosity to a search for communion.

Henri J.M. Nouwen - Bread for the Journey: A Daybook of Wisdom and Faith

All human beings are alone. No other person will completely feel like we do, think like we do, act like we do. Each of us is unique, and our aloneness is the other side of our uniqueness. The question is whether we let our aloneness become loneliness or whether we allow it to lead us into solitude. Loneliness is painful; solitude is peaceful. Loneliness makes us cling to others in desperation; solitude allows us to respect others in their uniqueness and create community.Letting our aloneness gro

Marina Keegan -

We don't have a word for the opposite of loneliness, but if we did, I could say that's what I want in life. What I'm grateful and thankful to have found at Yale, and what I'm scared of losing when we wake up tomorrow after Commencement and leave this place. “It's not quite love and it's not quite community; it's just this feeling that there are people, an abundance of people, who are in this together. Who are on your team. When the check is paid and you stay at the table. When it's four A.M. and

Henri J.M. Nouwen - Bread for the Journey: A Daybook of Wisdom and Faith

When we feel lonely we keep looking for a person or persons who can take our loneliness away. Our lonely hearts cry out, 'Please hold me, touch me, speak to me, pay attention to me.' But soon we discover that the person we expect to take our loneliness away cannot give us what we ask for. Often that person feels oppressed by our demands and runs away, leaving us in despair. As long as we approach another person from our loneliness, no mature human relationship can develop. Clinging to one anothe

Lailah Gifty Akita - Think Great: Be Great!

Healthy ecosystems promote healthy life.

Katherine Catmull - The Radiant Road

On one of the right-side-up pages show wrote, with some difficulty, Know what roots know: there is only one tree.

Wess Stafford -

I have become convinced that the more wealth a country accumulates, the more isolated and lonely its people become. The loneliest are usually the children and the elderly. Children learn what they live, and isolation in the ‘village’ is one of the most destructive messages we daily write on the tablets of their hearts.

Niurka - Supreme Influence: Change Your Life with the Power of the Language You Use

What you look for in the world influences what materializes. What you perceive in the people around you influences how they show up.

David J. Greer - Wind In Your Sails

By connecting and being part of a community with a shared vision and goals, we can create great things.

Tom Wolfe - The Bonfire of the Vanities

Your self…is other people, all the people you're tied to, and it's only a thread.

Chris Matakas - My Mastery: Continued Education Through Jiu Jitsu

It is in community where we find our very selves.

Jared Brock - and Revived

Work is easy when it’s full of meaning and shared with others.

Parker J. Palmer - Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation

If we are unfaithful to true self, we will extract a price from others. We will make promises we cannot keep, build houses from flimsy stuff, conjure dreams that devolve into nightmares, and other people will suffer - if we are unfaithful to true self.

Dorothy L. Sayers - and Fulfillment at Work. a Christian Perspective.

There is, in fact, a paradox about working to serve the community, and it is this: that to aim directly at serving the community is to falsify the work; the only way to serve the community is to forget the community and serve the work.

Jefferson Davis -

Garfield's assassination attempt made "the whole nation care".

Wendell Berry - Jayber Crow

If God loves the world, might that not be proved in my own love for it? I prayed to know in my heart His love for the world, and this was my most prideful, foolish, and dangerous prayer. It was my step into the abyss. As soon as I prayed it, I knew that I would die. I knew the old wrong and the death that lay in the world. Just as a good man would not coerce the love of his wife, God does not coerce the love of His human creatures, not for Himself or for the world or for one another. To allow th

Lawrence Wright - The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11

The Trade Center dead formed a kind of universal parliament.

Naomi Levy - and Faith in Difficult Times

Sometimes when we’re suffering we feel as if we have been singled out. We wonder why God has picked on us. But my life as the rabbi of a small synagogue taught me that if that’s what we think, we are mistaken. We are never alone in our suffering. Scratch the surface of any family, any social gathering, any congregation, and you will find loss and pain there. We may not always be privy to the pain, but it is there just the same. If we had the power to peer inside the heart of any human being, we

Marquita Burke-DeJesus - Radically Ordinary

Suffering reminds us of our brokenness, our humanity. It disarms us of our self-absorption and magnifies our need for one another.

Jamsetji Tata -

In a free enterprise, the community is not just another stakeholder in business, but is in fact the very purpose of its existence.

Mary E. DeMuth - Everything: What You Give and What You Gain to Become Like Jesus

The more we love, the more it hurts, and the more we have to let go.

Mary E. DeMuth - Everything: What You Give and What You Gain to Become Like Jesus

As I look back over my mountains of growth and compare them to the molehills where I stagnated, community often made the difference.

Woodson Merrell - and Eliminate the Toxins Within

Often we see detox as a solitary pursuit, something we have to muscle up for and go it alone. But the truth is that it will be easier and healthier if you find a way to integrate your friends and family into the experience.

Chris Coppernoll - A Beautiful Fall

Community, community, community. It's ALL about community. That's the explanation of why it pains us when we find ourselves isolated from others. That's the reason why it hurts to say good-bye to those we love........ Nothing you purchase can replace community with your friends, family or God. No position at work can fill the void. Wealth can't take its place, and fame won't make any difference.

Israelmore Ayivor - Daily Drive 365

Aside your dreams to improve your community, country and continent, dare to save a soul for God. Show compassion, show love... Feed hungry souls and let God be glorified!

Craig Dent -

Through your influence, vision, ethics and authenticity you create a better reality for your family, community and organisation, where those around you and those who follow you are inspired to dream, learn and act

Kate Mullane Robertson -

I will not hesitate.I will not hang back.I will go and offer my heart, for it is what I have to give...

John Bruna -

There is no inner peace found in taking care of me and mine. It is present in attending to the needs of we and ours.

Beatrice Rose Roberts - Twin Loyalties: From the Chronicles of Tar Ponds City

Well, we're originally from Glace Bay."Grandma Elsie's eyes glittered. She was looking at one of her own, a lost Cape Bretoner in need of help and offering a new story. "Tell me all about it, dear.

Jean Vanier - Community And Growth

A community that is growing rich and seeks only to defend its goods and its reputation is dying. It has ceased to grow in love. A community is alive when it is poor and its members feel they have to work together and remain united, if only to ensure that they can all eat tomorrow!

Jean Vanier - Community And Growth

...Individualistic material progress and the desire to gain prestige by coming out on top have taken over from the sense of fellowship, compassion and community. Now people live more or less on their own in a small house, jealously guarding their goods and planning to acquire more, with a notice on the gate that says, 'Beware of the Dog.

Shannon L. Alder -

It is not the number of prayers that will give you happiness, but the number you answer for another person.

Shane Claiborne - Red Letter Revolution: What If Jesus Really Meant What He Said?

God's people are not to accumulate stuff for tomorrow but to share indiscriminately with the scandalous and holy confidence that God will provide for tomorrow. Then we need not stockpile stuff in barns or a 401(k), especially when there is someone in need.

Eileen Anglin -

No amount of money can fill your heart up with what kindness and compassion can.

Shannon L. Alder -

One of the most important things you can do on this earth is to let people know they are not alone.

John Winthrop -

We must delight in each other, make others conditions our own, rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together, always having before our eyes our commission and community in the work, our community as members of the same body.

Vironika Tugaleva -

Fall open. Break open. Sit with others' openness. Let love be your medicine.

Paulo Freire - Pedagogy of the Oppressed

P71- if i do not love the world if i do not love life if i do not love people i cannot enter into dialogue.

Henri J.M. Nouwen - Out of Solitude: Three Meditations on the Christian Life

To care means first of all to empty our own cup and to allow the other to come close to us. It means to take away the many barriers which prevent us from entering into communion with the other. When we dare to care, then we discover that nothing human is foreign to us, but that all the hatred and love, cruelty and compassion, fear and joy can be found in our own hearts. When we dare to care, we have to confess that when others kill, I could have killed too. When others torture, I could have done

Jean Vanier - Community And Growth

A Christian community should do as Jesus did: propose and not impose. Its attraction must lie in the radiance cast by the love of brothers.

Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove - God's Economy: Redefining the Health and Wealth Gospel

People who are starving and dressed in rags don’t want to hear someone read a list of propositional “good news.” They want to see the good news in action. The church doesn’t hold revival meetings and call it a day — we feed the hungry, clothe the naked, dig wells, and staff medical clinics. Social action isn’t an optional part of evangelism; it is evangelism. This is an important correction to the overspirituality that dominated evangelical Christianity just a generation ago. But the both/and of

SupaNova Slom - and Rebuild Your Mind and Body

What if there were health food stores on every corner in the hood, instead of liquor stores!?

Christopher Heuertz -

These pages testify to the discovery of uhnlikely gifts when we stay in community--especially when we stay after things get hard.

Trevor D. Richardson - Dystopia Boy: The Unauthorized Files

We’re better together than we are apart. The American Dream has us looking out for ourselves even at the expense of our neighbors. That shit ain’t true, man.

Israelmore Ayivor - The Great Hand Book of Quotes

Live life so well that, even if you die, the empty seats behind you will tell the story that, "yea, this soul did what God sent him/her to do". Give life and hope into your family, village, community, country, continent and the world at large. You can do it!

Israelmore Ayivor - The Great Hand Book of Quotes

Whatever dream God gave to you is for the comfort of those God keeps around you!

Israelmore Ayivor -

Joy is meant to be felt; its not meant to be detained. It is meant to be shared with others; not to be felt alone. When all the mouths smile out their teeth together, thats when the greatest happiness can be measured. You don't smile in order to see your friends cry and claim your joy is divine.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer -

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.

Suzanne M. Wolfe - The Confessions of X

On becoming a mother, I had forever left that solitary state of girlhood behind, and if I sometimes pined to be alone with Augustine as we used to be in our first love, a quick glance at my sleeping son's face soon banished such foolish thoughts. It was as if Augustine and I had been in a beautiful bubble but when my body split open in childbirth, the shimmering membrane broke and we were delivered to the world.

Cherie Priest - Dreadnought

It was a train full of strangers, and they were all the same.

Yuval Noah Harari - Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

Romantic literature often presents the individual as somebody caught in a struggle against the state and the market. Nothing could be further from the truth. The state and the market are the mother and father of the individual, and the individual can survive only thanks to them. The market provides us with work, insurance and a pension. If we want to study a profession, the government’s schools are there to teach us. If we want to open a business, the bank loans us money. If we want to build a h

Jeanette Winterson - Christmas Days: 12 Stories and 12 Feasts for 12 Days

Christmas is about community, collaboration, celebration. Done right, Christmas can be an antidote to the Me First mentality that has rebranded capitalism as neo-liberalism. The shopping mall isn't our true home, nor is it a public space, though, as libraries, parks, playgrounds, museums and sports facilities disappear, for many the fake friendliness of the mall is the only public space left, apart from the streets

Grace Lee Boggs -

As I witness and participate in our visionary efforts to revitalize Detroit and contrast them with the multibillion dollars' worth of megaprojects advanced by politicians and developed that involve casinos, giant stadiums, gentrification, and the Super Bowl, I am saddened by their shortsightedness. At the same time I rejoice in the energy being unleashed in the community by our human-scale programs that involve bringing the country back into the city and removing the walls between schools and co

Masanobu Fukuoka - The One-Straw Revolution

In my opinion, if 100% of the people were farming it would be ideal. If each person were given one quarter-acre, that is 1 1/4 acres to a family of five, that would be more than enough land to support the family for the whole year. If natural farming were practiced, a farmer would also have plenty of time for leisure and social activities within the village community. I think this is the most direct path toward making this country a happy, pleasant land.

Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove - New Monasticism: What It Has to Say to Today's Church

you don’t have to live in community long to realize that lives which are blessed and instructive are still flawed. The grace of the gospel isn’t only that the Word was made flesh in Jesus, but also that the eternal Word is made present in weak and wonderful people.

Beth Moore - To Live Is Christ

Someone suddenly had direct, unabashed access to my heart.

Beth Moore - To Live Is Christ

Even though Paul knew farewells were inevitable, he still formed deep relationships.

Philip Zaleski - Charles Williams

A Christian's duty, Lewis believed, is not simply to tolerate "X" but to make life with "X" an occasion to work on one's own character flaws.

Philip Zaleski - Charles Williams

The Inklings were comrades who have been touched by war, who view life through the lens of war, yet who look for hope and found it, in fellowship, where so many other modern writers and intellectuals saw only broken narratives, disfigurement, and despair.

Philip Zaleski - Charles Williams

A Christian atmosphere is no protection against preening egos.

Matt Chandler -

If you know EVERYONE, you don't know ANYONE.

Jonathan Haidt - The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion

The advantage which disciplined soldiers have over undisciplined hordes follows cheaply from the confidence which each man feels in his comrades. Charles Darwin

Charles Haddon Spurgeon - Based on the English Standard Version

I serve," should be the motto of all the princes of the royal family of heaven.

Andrew Zolli - Resilience: Why Things Bounce Back

The author says crises tend to reveal the connectivity of systems that had previously been study only in isolation.

Eugene H. Peterson - Tell It Slant: A Conversation on the Language of Jesus in His Stories and Prayers

The church is the primary arena in which we learn that glory does not consist in what we do for God but in what God does for us.

Sherry Turkle - Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other

Relationships we complain about nevertheless keep us connected to life.

Eugene H. Peterson - Tell It Slant: A Conversation on the Language of Jesus in His Stories and Prayers

Action without prayer thins out into something very exterior. A prayerless life can result in effective action and accomplish magnificent things, but if there is no developed interiority, the action never enters into the depth and intimacy of relationships.

Mike Dsane -

Having a big family is costly and invasive. As we realize how big our family is in Christ, how our family obligations transcend our artificial boundaries, there ought to be a weightiness to our response to our brothers and sisters in need.

Matt Chandler - Creature of the Word: The Jesus-Centered Church

Worship shadows eternity and provides supernatural encouragement.

Richard Brookhiser - Founders' Son: A Life of Abraham Lincoln

Lincoln began to emerge from his funk by helping a coworker who looked up to him out of a funk of his own.

Frank Bruni -

With a more expansive stretch, there’s a better chance that I’ll be around at the precise, random moment when one of my nephews drops his guard and solicits my advice about something private. Or when one of my nieces will need someone other than her parents to tell her that she’s smart and beautiful.

Tim Challies - The Next Story: Life and Faith after the Digital Explosion

By giving us control, our new technologies tend to enhance existing idols in our lives. Instead of becoming more like Christ through the forming and shaping influence of the church community, we form, and shape, and personalize our community to make it more like us. We take control of things that are not ours to control. Could it be that our desire for control is short-circuiting the process of change and transformation God wants us to experience through the mess of real world, flesh and blood,

Jen Pollock Michel - Ambition & the Life of Faith

Our small group is committed to getting the biblical text under our skin.

James Finley - Meditation for Christians: Entering the Mind of Christ

I experienced the Church to be this refuge within and beyond myself.

David Brooks -

The struggle against the weakness in yourself is never a solitary struggle. No person can achieve self-mastery or his or her own.

Curtis Sittenfeld - American Wife

Since I was a small girl, I have lived inside this cottage, shelted by its roof and walls. I have known of people suffering—I have not been blind to them in the way that privilege allows, the way my own husband and now my daughter are blind. It is a statement of fact and not a judgement to say Charlie and Ella’s minds aren’t oriented in that direction; in a way, it absolves them, whereas the unlucky have knocked on the door of my consciousness, they have emerged from the forest and knocked many

Dietrich Bonhoeffer - Life Together: The Classic Exploration of Christian Community

What determines our brotherhood is what that man is by reason of Christ. Our community with one another consists solely in what Christ has done to both of us. This is true not merely at the beginning, as though in the course of time something else were to be added to our community; it remains so for all the future and to all eternity. I have community with others and I shall continue to have it only through Jesus Christ. The more genuine and the deeper our community becomes, the more will everyt

Jerry Bridges - True Community: The Biblical Practice of Koinonia

It is not the fact that we are united in common goals or purposes that makes us a community. Rather, it is the fact that we share a common life in Christ.

Jayce O'Neal -

God never taught us to live like TV DINNERS in a freezer: Together, but totally separate. #community

Tanner Colby - Some of My Best Friends Are Black: The Strange Story of Integration in America

Many people in Nixon’s camp had genuine faith in affirmative action. It wasn’t designed to fail, but it wasn’t designed to succeed, either; the intent behind it was not rooted in a desire to help black people attain equal standing in society. It was riot insurance. It was a financial incentive for blacks to stay in their own communities and out of the suburbs. (183)

Christina Engela -

Our community deserves leaders who should know what debates and arguments are better conducted out of the public eye, instead of dumping their baskets of dirty laundry all over the internet. Our community deserves leaders who do not put political expedience or convenience before their commitments to those they supposedly represent. Our community deserves leaders who do not make about-turns on issues such as freedom of speech and accountability to the community they serve when it becomes too emba

Karl Barth - The Humanity of God

A free theologian works in communication with other theologians...He waits for them and asks them to wait for him. Our sadly lacking yet indispensable theological co-operation depends directly or indirectly on whether or not we are wiling to wait for one another, perhaps lamenting, yet smiling with tears in our eyes.

Dan Harmon -

None of us are bad people. We float around and we run across each other and we learn about ourselves, and we make mistakes and we do great things. We hurt others, we hurt ourselves, we make others happy and we please ourselves. We can and should forgive ourselves and each other for that.

Diana Athill -

If we are lucky enough, as I am, to be from time to time in quite close contact with young people, they can sometimes make it easier to hang on to this notion when they function, as every person does vis-a-vis every other person they come up against, as a mirror. Always we are being reflected in the eyes of others. Are we silly or sensible, stupid or clever, bad or good, unattractive or sexy...? We never stop being at least slightly aware of, if not actively searching for, answers to such questi

Thomm Quackenbush - #2)

The vampire community has enough problems. We don't need to add petty backbiting to it.

Namsoon Kang - and Solidarity in an Uneven World

I fully recognize there is an urgent need for constructing the _strategic we-nes-in-sameness_ and promoting the _solidarity of sameness_. The sheer realization of the inextricable interconnectedness of I-ness/me-ness and we-ness/us-ness is the round for an authentic solidarity with one another in spite of and regardless of the difference.

Kjiva -

Dealing with pain for surviving on this thirsty concrete

merlin8thomas -

I AM RESPONSIBLE FOR THE THING I DO NOT WHAT MY COMMUNITY OR RELIGION DOES.

Andrei Tarkovsky - Sculpting in Time

Art is by nature aristocratic, and naturally selective in its effect on the audience. For even in its 'collective' manifestations, like theatre or cinema, its effect is bound up with the intimate emotions of each person who comes into contact with a work. The more the individual is traumatised and gripped by these emotions, the more significant a place will the work have in his experience.The aristocratic nature of art, however does not in any way absolve the artist of his responsibility to his

Malti Bhojwani -

Throw your empty pop-corn tub in the trash and the entire cinema will be clean for the next patrons.

Stendhal - Vanina Vanini and

One can acquire everything in solitude except character.