Quotes about Interconnectedness

To build community, it is important to accept the insight of interbeing, of interconnectedness. We must realize that happiness is not an individual matter. Finding happiness through our separate, individual self is impossible.

If you are happy, all of us will profit from it. Society will profit from it. All living beings will profit from it.

A human being is made up of only non-human elements.

We transmit our thoughts, speech and actions - collectively known as our karma to our children and to the world, that is our future.

What every man looks for in life is his own salvation and the salvation of the men he lives with. By salvation I mean first of all the full discovery of who he himself really is. Then I mean something of the fulfillment of his own God-given powers, in the love of others and of God. I mean also the discovery that he cannot find himself in himself alone, but that he must find himself in and through others.

It is a law of man's nature, written into his very essence, and just as much a part of him as the desire to build houses and cultivate the land and marry and have children and read books and sing songs, that he should want to stand together with other men in order to acknowledge their common dependence on God, their Father and Creator.

We become ourselves by dying to ourselves. We gain only what we give up, and if we give up everything we can everything. We cannot find ourselves within ourselves, but only in others, yet at the same time, before we can go out to others we must find ourselves.

God does not give us graces or talents or virtues for ourselves alone. We are members one of another and everything that is given to one member is given for the whole body. I do not wash my feet to make them more beautiful than my face.

Commerce links all mankind in one common brotherhood of mutual dependence and interests.

Sons branch out, but one woman leads to another.

We are all dependent on one another, every soul of us on earth.

You think the choices you make just affect you and the other person, but you don't realize how one choice ripples toward everybody. You included.