Writers have always been conscious of the need to connect with their readers. We can connect back with writers from across the centuries by reading what has come before; the ideas of different writers and thinkers build on one another, they form attachments that spring new thoughts in us. These connections quotes are sure to inspire you.
All is One, Connecting Quotes
All religion, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree.”
Albert Einstein, Out of My Later Years (1950)
Refuse to put others either above you or below you, but instead see them as you.
Wayne Dyer, Manifest Your Destiny (1997)
The body is affected by everything that is happening around you; it is not separate from what is happening around you. Whatever is happening there, is happening here– there is only the physical response. This is affection.
U.G. Krisnamurti, Conversations With a Man Called U.G.
There is nothing that does not contain contradiction; without contradiction nothing would exist.”
Mao Tse Tung, “On Contradiction” (1937)
The universe is but one great city, full of beloved ones, divine and human by nature, endeared to each other.
Epictetus, Enchiridon of Epictetus (c. 125 A.D.)
This we know. The Earth does not belong to man; man belongs to the Earth. This we know. All things are connected like blood which unites one family. All things are connected. Whatever befalls the Earth befalls the sons of the Earth. Man did not weave the web of life; he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself.
Chief Seattle, Address (1853)
What we call foreign affairs is no longer foreign affairs. It’s a local affair. Whatever happened in Indonesia is important to Indiana. Whatever happened in any corner of the world has some effect on the farmer in Dickinson County, Kansas or a worker in a factory.
President Dwight Eisenhower (6/12/1959)
We need to find out, not a formula, but a temper– not a creed, but a Faith– which is common to all, and which underlies all, and supports all, and inspires all.
T.H. Brindley, The Modern Churchman (September 1921)
Connection of Life
Your personalities are nothing but dolls tied to your feet. I don’t have to know your personal life, your personality. I don’t have to be acquainted with you personally, I know you essentially. By knowing myself, I have known you all. By dissolving my own problems I know your problems, and I know the key to how they can be dissolved.”
Osho, Discourses
No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of 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 many or thy friends or of thine were; any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind.”
John Donne, Meditation
I am born connected. I am born remembering rivers flowing from my mother’s body into my body. I pray at her Fountain of Life, saturated in milk and blood, water and honey. She passes on to me the meaning of religion because she links me to our origin in God and Mother.” Meinrad Craighead, The Mother’s Song (1986)
Death and sleep make us all alike, rich and poor, high and low.
Cervantes, Don Quixote (1615)
All for one and one for all.
Aleandre Dumas, The Three Musketeers (1844)
The Whole is in the Parts
The whole ocean is made of single drops.
Thomas Fuller (1732)
The good writer seems to be writing about himself but has his eye always on that thread of the universe which runs through himself, and all things.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Comedy is an escape, not from truth but from despair: a narrow escape into faith. It believes in a universal cause for delight, even though knowledge of the cause is always twitched away from under us… In tragedy every moment is eternity; in comedy, eternity is a moment.”
Christopher Fry, in Time (11/20/1950)
This life of yours that you are living is not merely a piece of this entire existence, but is on a certain sense the ‘whole;’ only this whole is not so constituted that it can be surveyed in one single glance. This, as we know, is that the Brahmins express in that sacred, mystic formula which is yet really so simple and so clear: TAT TVAM ASI, “this is you.” Or, again, in such words s ‘I am in the east and in the west, I am below and above, I AM THIS WHOLE WORLD.
Erwin Schrodinger, My View of the World (1951)
When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe. One fancies a heart like our own must be beating in every crystal and cell.
John Muir, My First Summer in the Sierra (1911)
Man is not a fragmentary part of the world but contains the whole riddle of the universe and the solution of it.
Nicolas Berdyaev, The Destiny of Man (1931)
The Parts Working Together
Being as it were a torrent, in and out of which bodies pass, coalescing and cooperating with the whole, as the various parts in us so with one another.
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
Consider… that all your five senses are differing forms of one basic sense– something like touch. Seeing is highly sensitive touching. The eyes touch, or feel, light waves and so enable us to touch the things that reach our hands. Similarly, the ears touch sound waves in the air, and the nose tiny particles of dust and gas.
Alan Watts, The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are
The whole object of the organization is to get cooperation, to get each individual the benefit of all the knowledge and all the experience of all the individuals.
Hamilton McFarland, Barksdale, Dupont (1909)
We Are Part of the Natural World
I will praise thee, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.
Psalms 139:14
All the things of the universe are perfect miracles, each as profound as any.
Walt Whitman, “Starting from Paumanok,” Leaves of Grass (1860)
To me, the sea is like a person—like a child that I’ve known a long time. It sounds crazy, I know, but when I swim in the sea I talk to it. I never feel alone when I’m out there.
Gertrude Ederle, first woman to swim the English Channel in 1926
Are not the mountains, waves and skies a part of me and my soul, as I of them?
Lord Byron, Childe Harolde’s Pilgrimage (1812-1818)
A constant question with [my father] was, ‘I wonder what is the cause of so-and-so?;’ or again putting it directly to me, ‘Can you tell the cause of this?’ Always the tendency in himself, and the tendency strengthened in me, was regard everything as naturally caused…. There was [thus] established a habit of seeking for causes, as well a tacit belief in the universality of causation.
Herbert Spencer, An Autobiography (1904)
There is no dichotomy between spirit and flesh, no split between Godhead and the World…. Spiritual union is found in life within nature, passion, sensuality—thorugh being fully human, fully one’s self.
Starhawk, The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Great Goddess (1979)
Empathy: Connecting to One Another
We have met the enemy, and he is us.
Pogo
O world, I cannot hold thee close enough!
Edna St. Vincent Millay, God’s World (1917)
Everyone is a moon, and has a dark side which he never shows to anybody.
Mark Twain
The worst sin toward our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them.
George Bernard Shaw
It seems to me that there is in each of us a capacity to comprehend the impressions and emotions which have been experienced by mankind from the beginning. This inherited capacity is a sort of sixth sense– a soul-sense which sees, hears, feels, all in one.
Helen Keller, The Story of My Life (1903)
The merciful man doeth good to his own soul.
Proverbs 11:17
We hand folks over to God’s mercy and show none ourselves.
George Eliot, Adam Bede (1859)
Christ leads us to put ourselves out in order to take friends in. He inspired us to see good in persons we never noticed or liked.
Ralph W. Sockman
Connect With Another Point of View
You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view– until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.”
Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird (1960)
It sometimes happened that you might be familiar with a man for several years thinking he was a wild animal, and you would regard him with contempt. And then suddenly a moment would arrive when some uncontrollable impulse would lay his soul bare, and you would behold in it such riches, such sensitivity and warmth, such a vivid awareness of its own suffering and the suffering of others, that the scales would fall from your eyes and at first you would hardly be able to believe what you had seen and heard. The reverse also happens.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The House of the Dead (1862)
Meaning Comes from Interaction
It takes a variety of people to challenge us, encourage us, promote us, and most of all, help us achieve a broader dimension of ourselves.
Glenn Van Ekeren
When we get too caught up in the busyness of the world, we lose connection with one another– and ourselves.”
Jack Kornfield
In the rains of spring / An umbrella and raincoat / Pass by, conversing.
Yosa Buson
It often happens that only from the words of a good storyteller do we realize that we have done and what we have missed, and what we should have done what we shouldn’t have. It is perhaps in these stories, oral and written, that the true history of mankind can be found and that through them one can perhaps sense if not fully know the meaning of that history.
Ivo Andric, Nobel Prize acceptance speech (5/13/1962)
Bigotry tries to keep truth safe in its hand with a grip that kills it.
Rabindranath Tague, Fireflies (1924)
We appreciate what we share; we do not appreciate what we receive. Friendship, affection comes about by two people sharing a significant moment, by having an experience in common.
Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Insecurities of Freedom (1967)
There is a design for all humanity, which will be manifested only as humanity becomes a whole, a design which will make clear all that has gone before.
N. Sri Ram, Thoughts for Aspirants (1972)
The spiritual life does not remove us from the world but leads us deeper into it.
Henri J.M. Nouwen, “Do Not Worry: All This Will Be Over,” Catholic Agitator (September 1980)