Interconnectedness Quotes

“You are never alone. You are eternally connected with everyone.”
― Amit Ray, Meditation: Insights and Inspirations

“To understand just one life you have to swallow the world ... do you wonder, then, that I was a heavy child?”
― Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children

“Love is wise; hatred is foolish. In this world, which is getting more and more closely interconnected, we have to learn to tolerate each other, we have to learn to put up with the fact that some people say things that we don't like. We can only live together in that way. But if we are to live together, and not die together, we must learn a kind of charity and a kind of tolerance, which is absolutely vital to the continuation of human life on this planet.”
― Bertrand Russell

“When I've thought about him dying - which admittedly isn't that much - I always thought of it like you said, that all strings inside him broke. But there are a thousand ways to look at it: maybe the strings break, or maybe our ships think, or maybe we're grass - our roots are so interdependent that no one is dead as long as soneone is still alive. We don't suffer from a shortage of metaphors, is what I mean. But you have to be careful which metaphor you choose, because it matters. If you choose the strings, then you're imagining a world in which you can become irreparably broken. If you choose grass, you're saying that we are all infinitely interconnected, that we can use these root systems not only to understand one another but to become one another. The metaphors have implications...
I like the strings, I always have. Because that's how it feels. But the strings make pain seem more fatal than it is...We are not as frail as the strings would make us believe. And I like the grass, too. The grass got me to you, helped me imagine you as an actual person. But we're not different sprouts from the same plant. I can't be you. You can't be me. You can imagine another well- but not quite perfectly, you know?
"Maybe, it's more like you said before, all of us being cracked open. Like each of us starts out as a watertight vessel. And these things happen-these people leave us, or don't love us, or don't get us, or we don't get them, and we lose and fail and hurt one another. And the vessel starts to crack open in places. And I mean, yeah, once the vessel cracks open, the end becomes inevitable...But there is all this time between when the cracks start to open up and when we finally fall apart. And it's only in that time that we can see each other, because we see out of ourselves through our cracks and into others through theirs. When did we see each other face-to-face? Not until you saw into my cracks and I saw into yours. Before that we were just looking at ideas of each other, like looking at your window shade but never looking inside. But once the vessel cracks, the like can get in. The like can get out.”
― John Green, Paper Towns

“But there was one person who he felt would understand. Everyone thought she was a bit strange and might even be a witch. Her name was Alice and she lived down the road in a pretty, but a very ramshackle house. In the summer, her house was covered by so many climbing roses that you could hardly see it. She grew all sorts of fruits and vegetables. She often gave Joey’s family some of her delicious tomatoes, berries, and other vegetables. Still, she was strange, and he was slightly afraid of her. She talked to her plants!”
― Ellen J. Lewinberg, Joey and His Friend Water

“Pull a thread here and you’ll find it’s attached to the rest of the world.”
― Nadeem Aslam, The Wasted Vigil

“My brother asked the birds to forgive him: that sounds senseless, but it is right; for all is like an ocean, all is flowing and blending; a touch in one place sets up movement at the other end of the earth. It may be senseless to beg forgiveness of the birds, but birds would be happier at your side –a little happier, anyway– and children and all animals, if you yourself were nobler than you are now. It’s all like an ocean, I tell you. Then you would pray to the birds too, consumed by an all-embracing love in a sort of transport, and pray that they too will forgive you your sin.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“That which is not good for the swarm, neither is it good for the bee.

- Book VI, 54.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“It is an occult law moreover, that no man can rise superior to his individual failings without lifting, be it ever so little, the whole body of which he is an integral part. In the same way no one can sin, nor suffer the effects of sin, alone. In reality, there is no such thing as 'separateness' and the nearest approach to that selfish state which the laws of life permit is in the intent or motive.”
― Helena Petrovna Blavatsky

“The fundamental delusion of humanity is to suppose that I am here and you are out there. -Yasutani Roshi, Zen master (1885-1973)”
― Yasutani Roshi

“When a person dies, they cross over from the realm of freedom to the realm of slavery. Life is freedom, and dying is a gradual denial of freedom. Consciousness first weakens and then disappears. The life-processes – respiration, the metabolism, the circulation – continue for some time, but an irrevocable move has been made towards slavery; consciousness, the flame of freedom, has died out.
The stars have disappeared from the night sky; the Milky Way has vanished; the sun has gone out; Venus, Mars and Jupiter have been extinguished; millions of leaves have died; the wind and the oceans have faded away; flowers have lost their colour and fragrance; bread has vanished; water has vanished; even the air itself, the sometimes cool, sometimes sultry air, has vanished. The universe inside a person has ceased to exist. This universe is astonishingly similar to the universe that exists outside people. It is astonishingly similar to the universes still reflected within the skulls of millions of living people. But still more astonishing is the fact that this universe had something in it that distinguished the sound of its ocean, the smell of its flowers, the rustle of its leaves, the hues of its granite and the sadness of its autumn fields both from those of every other universe that exists and ever has existed within people, and from those of the universe that exists eternally outside people. What constitutes the freedom, the soul of an individual life, is its uniqueness. The reflection of the universe in someone's consciousness is the foundation of his or her power, but life only becomes happiness, is only endowed with freedom and meaning when someone exists as a whole world that has never been repeated in all eternity. Only then can they experience the joy of freedom and kindness, finding in others what they have already found in themselves.”
― Vasily Grossman, Life and Fate

“We are taught to believe that the ‘alienation’ that we experience sometimes, when we withdraw from everything or feel alone, is a craving for something sexual, material, or in the physical - and can be cured by popping a pill in most cases. When in Truth, it’s the circuitry within our souls and minds that is hinting to be connected - to real flowing energy - outside of our TVs and computer monitors. What many of us mistaken for depression is actually a need to be understood, or to see desires come to fruition. There is absolutely nothing abnormal about feeling disconnected. Your sensitivity only means you are more human than most. If you cry, you are alive. I’d be more worried if you didn’t.”
― Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem

“In today's world, the elites are growing even more comfortable with one another across national lines, yet at the same time, less comfortable with low-income people who share their nationality. How we create those bonds of community that are truly global as well as national is one of our generation's great challenges.”
― Jacqueline Novogratz, The Blue Sweater: Bridging the Gap Between Rich and Poor in an Interconnected World

“Connectedness. One thing leads to another. Often in unexpected ways.”
― Holly Goldberg Sloan, Counting by 7s

“Quoting geneticists, Guy Murcia says we’re all family. You have at least a million relatives as close as tenth cousin, and no one on Earth is further removed than your fiftieth cousin. Murcia also describes out kinship though an analysis of how deeply we share the air. With each breath, you take into your body 10 sextillion atoms, and-owing to the wind’s ceaseless circulation- over a year’s time you have intimate relations with oxygen molecules exhaled by every person alive, as well as everyone who ever lived. (The Seven Mysteries of Life)”
― Rob Brezsny, Pronoia is the Antidote for Paranoia: How the Whole World is Conspiring to Shower You With Blessings

“Most ecofeminists reject dichotomies and hierarchies as alien to the natural world – nature is interconnections.”
― Lisa Kemmerer, Sister Species: Women, Animals and Social Justice

“When we help another, we are helped. If we harm another, we harm ourselves. Perhaps harder to grasp—if we harm ourselves, we harm the whole universe.”
― Rachel Wooten, Tara

“You cannot care for the land if you do not care for its people. Climate justice is people justice.”
― Lawrence Nault

“We are raised to fear the wild. But the wild is not our enemy. It’s the part of us that still remembers how to belong.”
― Lawrence Nault

“What we call ordinary life is sacred to someone. Protect it like it’s yours—because it is.”
― Lawrence Nault

“The Earth doesn’t need saving. It needs remembering. We forgot we were part of it, not apart from it.”
― Lawrence Nault

“I'm producing too many stories at once because what I want is for you to feel, around the story, a saturation of other stories that I could tell and maybe will tell or who knows may already have told on some other occasion, a space full of stories that perhaps is simply my lifetime, where you can move in all directions, as in space, always finding stories that cannot be told until other stories are told first, and so, setting out from any moment or place, you encounter always the same density of material to be told. In fact, looking in perspective at everything I am leaving out of the main narration, I see something like a forest that extends in all directions and is so thick that it doesn't allow light to pass: a material, in other words, much richer than what I have chosen to put in the foreground this time, so it is not impossible that the person who follows my story may feel himself a bit cheated, seeing that the stream is dispersed into so many trickles, and that of the essential events only the last echoes and reverberations arrive at him; but it is not impossible that this is the very effect I aimed at when I started narrating, or let's say it's a trick of the narrative art that I am trying to employ, a rule of discretion that consists in maintaining my position slightly below the narrative possibilities at my disposal.”
― Italo Calvino, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler

“Compassion is reciprocal. As you develop your own mental and emotional stability and extend that stability through a compassionate understanding of others and dealing with them in a kind, empathetic way, your own intentions or aspirations will be fulfilled more quickly and easily. Why? Because if you treat others compassionately—with the understanding that they have the same desire for happiness and the same desire to avoid unhappiness that you do—then the people around you feel a sense of attraction, a sense of wanting to help you as much as you help them.

…In a sense, compassion practice demonstrates the truth of interdependence in action. The more openhearted you become toward others, the more openhearted they become toward you.”
― Mingyur Rinpoche, The Joy of Living: Unlocking the Secret and Science of Happiness

“From a Buddhist perspective, the description of reality provided by quantum mechanics offers a degree of freedom to which most people are not accustomed, and that may at first seem strange and even a little frightening. As much as Westerners in particular value the capacity for freedom, the notion that the act of observation of an event can influence the outcome in random, unpredictable ways can seem like too much responsibility. It’s much easier to assume the role of the victim and assign the responsibility or blame for our experience to some person or power outside oneself. If we’re to take the discoveries of modern science seriously, however, we have to assume responsibility for our moment-by-moment experience.

(...) one of the most basic of the Buddha’s teachings: Everything you think, everything you say, and everything you do is reflected back to you as your own experience. If you cause someone pain, you experience pain ten times worse. If you promote others’ happiness and well-being, you experience the same happiness ten times over. If your own mind is calm, then the people around you will experience a similar degree of calmness.

Even Heisenberg’s famous uncertainty principle acknowledges an intimate connection between inner experience and physical manifestation.”
― Mingyur Rinpoche

“Systemic racism continues hard and strong,
particularly against Indigenous people,
Why else would we be one of only four countries in 2007
to vote against a United Nations Global Declaration of Indigenous Rights?

We need to learn more.
We need to do better.
We are all woven together
in the fabric of the Earth
and over time
we will all thrive or fail
together.”
― Shellen Lubin

“The hum beneath everything... It no longer came from him. It was him. Or he was it.”
― Ronen Dancziger, The Boxmaker’s Apprentice

“We are not here to conquer the wild. We are here to remember we are part of it.”
― Lawrence Nault

“We are a totality made of many interlocking parts. This is why we must remember that our individual healing is directly connected to our collective healing.”
― Lorena Saavedra Smith, Awaken Your Roots: Reclaim Your Ancestry and Sovereignty by Heeding the Jaguar’s Call

“Nature is not a backdrop to your life. It is the very stage, the script, and the breath behind your lines.”
― Lawrence Nault

“Handle with care.
Me.
You.
All we do.

It doesn't mean do everything for anyone
or something for everyone
but
it does mean to do it
the most care-fully you are able.

I strive for that
each moment--
fail miserably much of the time,
but still try--
whether work, play
loving, writing--
to do it as care-fully
as I might--
for myself and those I love, yes,
but also for the ripple effects--
the butterfly-wing-flapping effects--
in places unknowable and unknown.”
― Shellen Lubin