Best 4343 quotes in «community quotes» category

We recognize, then, that only as we are within the fellowship can we be· alone, and only he that is alone can live in the fellowship. Only in the fellowship do we learn to be rightly alone and only in aloneness do we learn to live rightly in the fellowship. It is not as though the one preceded the other; both begin at the same time, namely, with the call of Jesus Christ.

We’re better together than we are apart. The American Dream has us looking out for ourselves even at the expense of our neighbors. That shit ain’t true, man.

We're experiencing the genesis of a community where it does not matter where your roots lie, but what you believe in. We will continue to create an inclusive and sustainable spirit, spreading the word from coast to mountaintop.

Were people to mingle only with those of like mind, every man would be an insulate being." Thomas Jefferson

We represent the true human condition, the one permanent victory over cruelty and chaos. . . . Our true home is the imagination, and our kingdom is the wide-open world.

We simple need to focus on Jesus Christ and have a love for one another which is seen by receiving and being open to fellowship with all kinds of believers.

we sulked and, in the finest tradition of bored soldiers, sat around throwing stones at each other.

We've come a long way from the time when the crowning achievement in a woman's life was her youthful marriage. And many would agree that this represents progress for women. But when did the search for someone to marry become self-absorbed and pathetic? This absence of social sympathy for women's ambitions to marry is all the more striking because the social world has cared so deeply about virtually every other aspect of these privileged young women's inner and outer lives. (...) The achievement of a good marriage is the one area of life where the most privileged, accomplished, and high achieving young women in society face a loss of support and sympathy for their ambitions and where the social expectations are for disappointment and failure, not success.

We’ve made it private, contained it in family, when its audacity is in its potential to cross tribal lines. We’ve fetishized it as romance, when its true measure is a quality of sustained, practical care. We’ve lived it as a feeling, when it is a way of being. It is the elemental experience we all desire and seek, most of our days, to give and receive. The sliver of love’s potential that the Greeks separated out as eros is where we load so much of our desire, center so much of our imagination about delight and despair, define so much of our sense of completion. There is the love the Greeks called filia—the love of friendship. There is the love they called agape—love as embodied compassion, expressions of kindness that might be given to a neighbor or a stranger. The Metta of the root Buddhist Pali tongue, “lovingkindness,” carries the nuance of benevolent, active interest in others known and unknown, and its cultivation begins with compassion towards oneself.

We were breathing sooty air. The soot was composed of incinerated glass and steel but also, we knew, incinerated human flesh. When the local TV news announced that rescue workers sorting through the rubble in search of survivors were in need of toothpaste, half my block, having heard that there was finally something we could actually do besides worry and grieve, had already cleaned out the most popular brands at the corner deli by the time I got there, so at the rescue workers' headquarters I sheepishly dropped off fourteen tubes of Sensodyne, the toothpaste for sensitive teeth. We were members of the same body, breathing the cremated lungs of the dead and hoping to clean the teeth of the living.(Pg. 53)

We want the black-and-white picture, someone to blame. So we blame George Bush or Saddam Hussein, or black people or white people, or capitalism or communism, or the left or the right, or human nature, but reality is something else altogether. I could be any of those people. None of their behavior is anything I haven’t—on some scale—done myself. If you see that, and any real meditation work will reveal it to you beyond the shadow of a doubt, then you cannot possibly imagine that there is a “solution” to be found in fixing blame.

We will, in truth, spend many of our hours alone with our grief. In the cover of our solitude, we encounter another layer in our apprenticeship with sorrow. Here we are asked to hold an extended vigil with loss in the well of silence, slowly ripening our sorrow into something dense and gifting to the world. Our ability to drop into this interior world and do the difficult work of metabolizing sorrow is dependent on the community that surrounds us. Even when we are alone, it is necessary to feel the tethers of concern and kindness holding us as we step off into the unknown and encounter the wild edge of sorrow.

What does freedom mean if we accept the fundamental premise that humans are social beings, raised in certain social and historical contexts and belonging to particular communities that shape their desires and understandings of the world?

Whatever dream God gave to you is for the comfort of those God keeps around you!

What happened once I started distributing communion was the truly disturbing, dreadful realization about Christianity: You can't be a Christian by yourself.

What if there were health food stores on every corner in the hood, instead of liquor stores!?

What if we ceased to pledge our allegiance to the bottom line and stood, instead, with those who line the bottom?

What is a community? It is the sum total of our choices.

What you look for in the world influences what materializes. What you perceive in the people around you influences how they show up.

When everyone's building a fence, isn't it a true fool who lives out in the open?

When greed is enthroned, be it in a community or nation, ungodliness is celebrated at the altar of human pleasure.

Whenever we take the focus off ourselves and move it outward, we benefit. Life's most fortunate ironies are that what's best for the long run is best now, and selflessness serves our interests far better than selfishness. The wider our circle of considerations, the more stable we make the world—and the better the prospects for human experience and for all we might wish. The core message of each successive widening: we are one. The geometry of the human voyage is not linear; it's those ripples whose circles expand to encompass self, other, community, Life, and time.

When we suffer in silence, we think that we are alone, different, separate. When we share our stories of suffering, we find that we are the same.

When men learnt to talk in the beginning of the civilised word they used language not as a means of communication alone but as a means of excluding others--using it as a way of setting themselves apart and shutting out strangers.

When visions come to us in the night, they are called dreams. The very movement of history seems to be directed by the conception of these dreams and efforts to realize them. How we conceive of the future, in other words, is of utmost importance to our collective destiny.

When thinking is overrated And friends are easy to make, Check if it's too complicated Knowing yourself somehow... Inner peace's not hard to take, Never lost or underestimated. Get out of social media... NOW!

When we establish human connections within the context of shared experience we create community wherever we go.

When the highest value in a community is loyalty to the greater cause, meaning the continuity of the status quo, all means to this end are imbued with religious significance, and are thereby justified. "Hasidic Noir

When we converse, we act together toward a common end, and we act upon one another. Indeed, conversation is a form of activism - a political enterprise in the largest and oldest sense - a way of building sustaining community.

When you dream of what you want to see, whether in your life, home, community or nation, you need to keep watching those dreams until they come to fulfillment.

When you frame your actions around what you fear and what you think you can't do, those are the results you'll achieve.

Wherever I go, bookstores are still the closest thing to a town square.

Where are our heroes? Where are our role models? Why are we leaving youth behind and laughing at the ones who are still there? Why not help each other out instead? with a little grace. with a little compassion. Love for all and everyone around because we’re all stumbling or succeeding back and forth, every day, and I want more community. I want helpers and guidance. Am I helping someone? I don’t know, but since the tender age of eighteen I have written down my stories and experiences of love and loss and youth, just so these stories can exist in the world. For someone out there to find and read and feel a voice in my words saying, “I’ve been there, I’ve done this, you can too: come, follow me.” Have you ever lost something by teaching what you know, and learning what you don’t know? Have you ever lost something by helping someone in need, or letting someone help you while in need? Have you lost something by loving? In comparison, how much have you lost by meeting someone with ignorance and hate? Love. I will choose love. And I’m scared and shy, of everyone and everything, to make a fool of myself; to be laughed at; to not be what people would like me to be. But I will choose love because that’s the sort of person I want to be.

Wherever people gather for selfless ends, there is a vast augmentation of their individual capacities. Something wonderful, something momentous happens. An irresistible force begins to move, which, though we may not see it, is going to change our world.

Why is it deemed justifiable and appropriate for cops/police officers to kill other cops (friendly–fire) and citizens? Why do cops kill? Are they not taught to maim or slow down someone running or reaching for a weapon? If not, why not? Why do cops kill first and ask questions last? Why are police officers being military trained? What can we as citizens, taxpayers, and voters do to stop these killings and beatings of unarmed people? Why do we let this continue? How many more must die or get beat up before we realize something is wrong and needs to be changed? Will you, a friend, or a family member have to be killed or beaten by a cop before we realize that things have to change? Who's here to protect us from the cops when they decide to use excessive force, shoot multiple shells, and/or murder us?

Why are the police REALLY having trouble recruiting officers - especially Black officers? We have to bridge the gap between community and law enforcement.

Whose maps are we trying to read? And what are we trying to draw? It's so common to live in a place without truly knowing its history, its systems, and the people who are different from you and who move through different versions of the city.

Why is it that so many people start to value money so much that they trade in most of the hours and years of their life in order to get it?

Why, the whole world of knowledge is not worth that child's prayer to 'dear, kind God'! I say nothing of the sufferings of grown-up people, they have eaten the apple, damn them, and the devil take them all! But these little ones! The Brothers Karamazov Ivan to Alyosha, on the suffering and torture of children, " Book V - Pro and Contra, Chapter 4 - Rebellion.

Wilson had been killed by everybody. It was this that made his death special, the children had been told. It was justice, it was all the people showing how much they hated this crime. Killing was justice when everybody joined in.

With a more expansive stretch, there’s a better chance that I’ll be around at the precise, random moment when one of my nephews drops his guard and solicits my advice about something private. Or when one of my nieces will need someone other than her parents to tell her that she’s smart and beautiful.

Without bridges, there are no connections. Without bridges, there are only chasms. Without bridges, there are only longings. We cannot wait for the land to flatten and the stream to narrow before we seek to cross.

Without addressing how we live together and finding a way that respects both nature and our universal humanity, we won't have the collective ability, strength, or shared vision necessary to protect our world or build a better one.

Without God man neither knows which way to go, nor even understands who he is... One of the deepest forms of poverty a person can experience is isolation... Poverty is often produced by a rejection of God's love, by man's basic and tragic tendency to close in on himself, thinking himself to be self-sufficient or merely an insignificant and ephemeral fact, a "stranger" in a random universe...The human being develops when ... his soul comes to know itself and the truths that God has implanted deep within, when he enters into dialogue with himself and his Creator... It is not by isolation that man establishes his worth, but by placing himself in relation with others and with God.

Without somebody to watch me, laugh at my jokes, tell me what to do, ask me questions, race me to the river, make me guess the names of birds, or challenge me to count the silvery fish in a school, there was nothing for me to do. Without somebody to be somebody to, it was as though I wasn't somebody myself.

With the evolution of Us came the evolution of Them. The original Them was anyone who wasn’t blood related — Them was pretty much everyone. Over time, as the number of people in Us got bigger, Them got smaller. Them now might mean anyone in any other country. This is a common Them in America, and a Them that only (light use of this word) consists of 95% of the world. Another common Them in America is anyone who isn’t Christian, which is a measly 68% of the world, or roughly 4.8 Billion Thems. In a relatively short amount of time, Us went from being a fraction of a percent of humanity and Them the rest, to some people experiencing an Us of more than two billion other people, far more than were ever alive at the onset of Us and Them.

With the hollowing out of community by the market system, with its loss of structure, articulation, and form, comes the concomitant hollowing out of personality itself. Just as the spiritual and institutional ties that linked human beings together into vibrant social relations are eroded by the mass market, so the sinews that make for subjectivity, character, and self-definition are divested of form and meaning. The isolated, seemingly autonomous ego that bourgeois society celebrated as the highest achievement of "modernity" turns out to be the mere husk of a once fairly rounded individual whose very completeness as an ego was responsible because he or she was rooted in a fairly rounded and complete community.

Work is easy when it’s full of meaning and shared with others.

You became the sum total of where you lived, where you shopped, which church you went to, how many kids you had and which taxi company you used, and you only associated with people who had the same responses on their list.

Years later Lazar would recall questioning his mother as to who the people who shared his meals were. "Some are our relations," was the response, "But all of them are our people.