Human Interconnectedness Quotes

We can hear others, and we can travel with them without moving, and we can imagine them, and we are all connected one to the other by a crazy root system, like so many leaves of grass. But the game makes me wonder wheter we can really ever fully become another.

A person is a person through other persons; you can't be human in isolation; you are human only in relationships.

The influence of each human being on others in this life is a kind of immortality.

It is the individual who is not interested in his fellow men who has the greatest difficulties in life and provides the greatest injury to others. It is fro+m among such individuals that all human failures spring.

We are all descendants of Adam, and we are all products of racial miscegenation.

How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him.

Today, if we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other-that man, that woman, that child is my brother or my sister. If everyone could see the image of God in his neighbor, do you think we would still need tanks and generals?

How seriously can I take myself? I'm just one of six billion people, right?

If we can cultivate a concern for others, keeping in mind the oneness of humanity, we can build a more compassionate world.

Henry Miller may write about revelers self-woven into a human hooked rug, because his ecstasy is solemn.

When will we learn, when will the people of the world get up and say, Enough is enough. God created us for fellowship. God created us so that we should form the human family, existing together because we were made for one another. We are not made for an exclusive self-sufficiency but for interdependence, and we break the law of our being at our peril.

He who feels contempt for any living thing hath faculties that he hath never used, and thought with him is in its infancy.

Compassion becomes an automatic reaction when you see all of humanity as one undivided and indivisible family.

But without deeper reflection one knows from daily life that one exists for other people--first of all for those upon whose smiles and well-being our own happiness is wholly dependent, and then for the many, unknown to us, to whose destinies we are bound by the ties of sympathy.

It's an incredible mystery of God's love that the more you know how deeply you are loved, the more you will see how deeply your sisters and your brothers in the human family are loved.

In the face of the oppressed I recognize my own face, and in the hands of the oppressor I recognize my own hands. Their flesh is my flesh, their blood is my blood, their pain is my pain, their smile is my smile.

One of the sayings in our country is Ubuntu - the essence of being human. Ubuntu speaks particularly about the fact that you can't exist as a human being in isolation. It speaks about our interconnectedness. You can't be human all by yourself, and when you have this quality - Ubuntu - you are known for your generosity. We think of ourselves far too frequently as just individuals, separated from one another, whereas you are connected and what you do affects the whole World. When you do well, it spreads out; it is for the whole of humanity.

I read somewhere that everybody on this planet is separated by only six other people. Six degrees of separation between us and everyone else on this planet. The President of the United States, a gondolier in Venice, just fill in the names. I find it extremely comforting that we're so close. I also find it like Chinese water torture, that we're so close because you have to find the right six people to make the right connection... I am bound, you are bound, to everyone on this planet by a trail of six people.

Our situation on this earth seems strange. Every one of us appears here involuntarily and uninvited for a short stay, without knowing the whys and the wherefore. In our daily lives we only feel that man is here for the sake of others, for those whom we love and for many other beings whose fate is connected with our own. I am often worried at the thought that my life is based to such a large extent on the work of my fellow human beings and I am aware of my great indebtedness to them.

What I've come to learn is that the world is never saved in grand messianic gestures, but in the simple accumulation of gentle, soft, almost invisible acts of compassion, everyday acts of compassion. In South Africa they have a phrase called ubuntu. Ubuntu comes out of a philosophy that says, the only way for me to be human is for you to reflect my humanity back at me.

We may think we live in a digital age. But there are some things technology will never replace.

I feel strongly that we, all of us, are brothers and sisters, and nothing interferes with that except our education, our background, where we grew up and how we should do it. If you eliminated all those negatives and gave us an open view of what life would be like, it would be different.

The principle of the brotherhood of man is narcissistic... for the grounds for that love have always been the assumption that we ought to realize that we are the same the whole world over.

The fundamental law of human beings is interdependence. A person is a person through other persons.

We are all interconnected in a web of kindness from which it is impossible to separate ourself.