Common Ground
“With this Ring I thee wed, with my body I thee worship, and with all my wordly goods I thee endow.”
The Book of Common Prayer, The Wedding
“Sticks in a bundle are unbreakable.”
Bondei people (Tanzania) proverb
“Big projects give people something to identify with and work toward.”
Frank Carlucci (U.S. National Security Advisor), Frank Carlucci on Managment in Government (1987)
“Familiar acts are beautiful though love.”
Percy Bysshe Shelley, Prometheus Unbound
“What is life without the radiance of love?”
J.C. Friedrich von Schiller, Wallenstein’s Death (1799)
“In business for yourself, not by yourself.”
William James, The Principles of Psychology (1890)
Leaders and Followers
“The chief lesson I have learned in a long life is that the only way you can make a man trustworthy is by trusting him; and the surest way to make him untrustworthy is to distrust him and show your distrust.”
Henry L. Simpson (U.S. Secretary of Wat), memo to President F.D.. Roosevelt (Sept. 1945)
“When you know a thing, to hold that you know it; and when you do not know a thing, to allow that you do not know it; this is knowledge.”
Confucius, Analects
“A man whose eyes love opens risks his soul– His dancing breaks beyond the mind’s control.”
Farid Ud-Din Attar, The Conference of the Birds
“The glue that holds all relationships together– including the relationship between the leader and the led– is trust, and trust is based on integrity.”
Brian Tracy
The Other
“There is no such thingas genius. Some children are less damaged than others.”
R. Buckminster Fuller
“You cannot distinguish the good from the bad. He [God] treasures you more than you do yourself.”
Hakim Sanai, The Walled Garden of Truth
“The haft of the arrow had been feathered with one of the eagle’s own plumes. We often give our enemies the means of our own destruction.”
Aesop, The Eagle and the Arrow
Security
“Happy are the staffless/ They stumble not. Happy are the homeless,/ they are at home. The stumblers only– like ourselves, need walk with staffs. The home-chained only– like ourselves, must have a home.:
Mikhail Naimy, The Book of Mirdad: a lighthouse and a haven
“No person can build his security upon the nobleness of another person.”
Willa Cather, Alexander’s Bridge (1912)
“Those who would know much, and love little, will ever remain at but the beginning of a godly life.”
Mechtild of Mageburg, The Flowing Light of the Godhead (13th century)
“The social progress, order, security and peace of each country are necessarily connected with the social progress, order, security and peace of all other countries.”
Pope John XXIII, Pacem in Terris. (4/11/1963)
Spiritual Belonging
“Meditation is nothing but coming back home, just to have a little rest inside. It is not the chanting of a mantra, it inot even a prayer, it is just coming back home and having a little rest.”
Osho, Discourses
“Thou art a second world in miniature, the sun and moon are within thee, and also the stars.”
Origen, Hexapla (3rd century)
“I saw Eternity the other night,/ Like a great ring of pure and endless light,/ All calm as it was bright;/ All round beneath it, Time in hours, days years,/ Driv’n by the spheres,/ Like a vast shadow mov’d in which the world/ And all her train were burl’d.”
Henry Vaughan, The World (1650)
“I am that supreme and fiery force that sends forth all living sparks. Death hath no part in me, yet I bestow death wherefore I am girt about with wisdom as with wings. I am that living and fiery essence of the divine substance that glows in the beauty of the fields, and in the shining water, and in the burning sun and the moon and the stars, and in the force of the invisible wind, the breath of all living things. I breathe in the green grass and in the flowers, and in the living waters. All these live and do not die because I am in them. I am the source of teh thundered word by which all creatures are made, I permeate all things that they might not die. I am life.”
Hildegarde of Bingen, Meditations (12th century)
“You are all spirits. It is not that you ‘have’ a spirit. To have a spirit implies that you are spirit and that you are also something else. Human beings are spirits. Being a human being is one of the ways of being a spirit. “
Da Free John, The Fire Gospel