The most basic and powerful way to connect to another person is to listen. Just listen. Perhaps the most important thing we ever give each other is our attention.... A loving silence often has far more power to heal and to connect than the most well-intentioned words.

- Rachel Naomi Remen

And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our fear, our presence automatically liberates others.

- Marianne Williamson

The spiritual path is not a solo endeavor. In fact, the very notion of a self who is trying to free her/himself is a delusion. We are in it together and the company of spiritual friends helps us realize our interconnectedness.

- Tara Brach

The art of listening needs its highest development in listening to oneself; our most important task is to develop an ear that can really hear what we're saying.

- Sydney J. Harris

I'm neither an optimist nor a pessimist. I am a dyed-in-the-wool possibilist! By this, I mean with an eco-mind, we see that everything's connected and change is the only constant.

- Frances Moore Lappé

When people go within and connect with themselves, they realize they are connected to the universe and they are connected to all living things.

- Armand Dimele

Spirituality is allowing compassion and love to flourish. When belongness begins, corruption ends.

- Sri Sri Ravi Shankar

To touch the soul of another human being is to walk on holy ground.

- Stephen Covey

We seek not rest but transformation.
We are dancing through each other as doorways.

- Marge Piercy

Civilization grew in the beginning from the minute that we had communication -- particularly communication by sea that enabled people to get inspiration and ideas from each other and to exchange basic raw materials.

- Thor Heyerdahl

Relationship is the substance of our connections: things like family or blood relatives, as well as covenant relationship like marriage or adoption. Even beyond that, relationship can also be defined by association (church family, workplace, neighborhoods, students, etc.), or just the frequency in which we connect with people (if I see someone often, then I might say I have a relationship with them).

- Dan Lentz

Often attributed to Lila Watson, who has said she was "not comfortable being credited for something that had been born of a collective process" - the attribution here is the one she accepts.

- Aboriginal activists group, Queensland, 1970s

Self-absorption in all its forms kills empathy, let alone compassion. When we focus on ourselves, our world contracts as our problems and preoccupations loom large. But when we focus on others, our world expands. Our own problems drift to the periphery of the mind and so seem smaller, and we increase our capacity for connection -- or compassionate action.

- Daniel Goleman

Throughout our lives we long to love ourselves more deeply and to feel connected with others. Instead, we often contract, fear intimacy, and suffer a bewildering sense of separation. We crave love, and yet we are lonely. Our delusion of being separate from one another, of being apart from all that is around us, gives rise to all of this pain.

- Sharon Salzberg

A spiritual sensibility encourages us to see ourselves as part of the fundamental unity of all being. If the thrust of the market ethos has been to foster a competitive individualism, a major thrust of many traditional religious and spiritual sensibilities has been to help us see our connection with all other human beings.

- Michael Lerner

All human beings are interconnected, one with all other elements in creation.

- Henry Reed



Expressing gratitude is a natural state of being and reminds us that we are all connected.

- Valerie Elster



Intuition makes much of it; I mean by this the faculty of seeing a connection between things that in appearance are completely different; it does not fail to lead us astray quite often.

- Andre Weil



For most women, the language of conversation is primarily a language of rapport: a way of establishing connections and negotiating relationships.

- Deborah Tannen



Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect...

- E. M. Forster



Only through our connectedness to others can we really know and enhance the self. And only through working on the self can we begin to enhance our connectedness to others.

- Harriet Goldhor Lerner



The least movement is of importance to all nature. The entire ocean is affected by a pebble.

- Blaise Pascal



Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.

- Martin Luther King, Jr.



The life I touch for good or ill will touch another life, and that in turn another, until who knows where the trembling stops or in what far place my touch will be felt.

- Frederick Buechner



When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.

- John Muir



When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world.

- John Muir



I am a part of all that I have met.

- Alfred Tennyson



We don't accomplish anything in this world alone ... and whatever happens is the result of the whole tapestry of one's life and all the weavings of individual threads from one to another that creates something.

- Sandra Day O'Connor



Systems thinking is a discipline for seeing wholes. It is a framework for seeing interrelationships rather than things, for seeing patterns of change rather than static "snapshots." It is a set of general principles -- distilled over the course of the twentieth century, spanning fields as diverse as the physical and social sciences, engineering, and management.... During the last thirty years, these tools have been applied to understand a wide range of corporate, urban, regional, economic, political, ecological, and even psychological systems. And systems thinking is a sensibility -- for the subtle interconnectedness that gives living systems their unique character.

- Peter Senge



Today the network of relationships linking the human race to itself and to the rest of the biosphere is so complex that all aspects affect all others to an extraordinary degree. Someone should be studying the whole system, however crudely that has to be done, because no gluing together of partial studies of a complex nonlinear system can give a good idea of the behavior of the whole.

- Murray Gell-Mann



Indeed, to some extent it has always been necessary and proper for man, in his thinking, to divide things up, if we tried to deal with the whole of reality at once, we would be swamped. However when this mode of thought is applied more broadly to man's notion of himself and the whole world in which he lives, (i.e. in his world-view) then man ceases to regard the resultant divisions as merely useful or convenient and begins to see and experience himself and this world as actually constituted of separately existing fragments. What is needed is a relativistic theory, to give up altogether the notion that the world is constituted of basic objects or building blocks. Rather one has to view the world in terms of universal flux of events and processes.

- David Bohm



Each contact with a human being is so rare, so precious, one should preserve it.

- Anais Nin



We cannot live for ourselves alone. Our lives are connected by a thousand invisible threads, and along these sympathetic fibers, our actions run as causes and return to us as results.

- Herman Melville



It is told that Buddha, going out to look on life, was greatly daunted by death. "They all eat one another!" he cried, and called it evil. This process I examined, changed the verb, said, "They all feed one another," and called it good.

- Charlotte Perkins Gilman



The unique personality which is the real life in me, I can not gain unless I search for the real life, the spiritual quality, in others. I am myself spiritually dead unless I reach out to the fine quality dormant in others. For it is only with the god enthroned in the innermost shrine of the other, that the god hidden in me, will consent to appear.

An Ethical Philosophy of Life

- Felix Adler



... joy and sorrow are inseparable. . . together they come and when one sits alone with you . . . remember that the other is asleep upon your bed.

- Kahlil Gibran



We cannot hold a torch to light another's path without brightening our own.

- Ben Sweetland



The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together.

- William Shakespeare



Hate and force cannot be in just a part of the world without having an effect on the rest of it.

- Eleanor Roosevelt



A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.

- Albert Einstein



When you have once seen the glow of happiness on the face of a beloved person, you know that a man can have no vocation but to awaken that light on the faces surrounding him; and you are torn by the thought of the unhappiness and night you cast, by the mere fact of living, in the hearts you encounter.

- Albert Camus



If you have knowledge, let others light their candles in it.

- Margaret Fuller



If you see a whole thing - it seems that it's always beautiful. Planets, lives.... But close up a world's all dirt and rocks. And day to day, life's a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern.

- Ursula K. Le Guin



The same stream of life that runs through my veins night and day runs through the world and dances in rhythmic measures. It is the same life that shoots in joy through the dust of the earth in numberless blades of grass and breaks into tumultuous waves of leaves and flowers. It is the same life that is rocked in the ocean-cradle of birth and of death, in ebb and in flow. I feel my limbs are made glorious by the touch of this world of life. And my pride is from the life-throb of ages dancing in my blood this moment.

from Gitanjali

- Rabindranath Tagore



Whoever is happy will make others happy, too.

- Mark Twain