Interconnectedness Quotes

“You are never alone. You are eternally connected with everyone.”
― Amit Ray, Meditation: Insights and Inspirations

“To understand just one life you have to swallow the world ... do you wonder, then, that I was a heavy child?”
― Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children

“When I've thought about him dying - which admittedly isn't that much - I always thought of it like you said, that all strings inside him broke. But there are a thousand ways to look at it: maybe the strings break, or maybe our ships think, or maybe we're grass - our roots are so interdependent that no one is dead as long as soneone is still alive. We don't suffer from a shortage of metaphors, is what I mean. But you have to be careful which metaphor you choose, because it matters. If you choose the strings, then you're imagining a world in which you can become irreparably broken. If you choose grass, you're saying that we are all infinitely interconnected, that we can use these root systems not only to understand one another but to become one another. The metaphors have implications...
I like the strings, I always have. Because that's how it feels. But the strings make pain seem more fatal than it is...We are not as frail as the strings would make us believe. And I like the grass, too. The grass got me to you, helped me imagine you as an actual person. But we're not different sprouts from the same plant. I can't be you. You can't be me. You can imagine another well- but not quite perfectly, you know?
"Maybe, it's more like you said before, all of us being cracked open. Like each of us starts out as a watertight vessel. And these things happen-these people leave us, or don't love us, or don't get us, or we don't get them, and we lose and fail and hurt one another. And the vessel starts to crack open in places. And I mean, yeah, once the vessel cracks open, the end becomes inevitable...But there is all this time between when the cracks start to open up and when we finally fall apart. And it's only in that time that we can see each other, because we see out of ourselves through our cracks and into others through theirs. When did we see each other face-to-face? Not until you saw into my cracks and I saw into yours. Before that we were just looking at ideas of each other, like looking at your window shade but never looking inside. But once the vessel cracks, the like can get in. The like can get out.”
― John Green, Paper Towns

“Love is wise; hatred is foolish. In this world, which is getting more and more closely interconnected, we have to learn to tolerate each other, we have to learn to put up with the fact that some people say things that we don't like. We can only live together in that way. But if we are to live together, and not die together, we must learn a kind of charity and a kind of tolerance, which is absolutely vital to the continuation of human life on this planet.”
― Bertrand Russell

“But there was one person who he felt would understand. Everyone thought she was a bit strange and might even be a witch. Her name was Alice and she lived down the road in a pretty, but a very ramshackle house. In the summer, her house was covered by so many climbing roses that you could hardly see it. She grew all sorts of fruits and vegetables. She often gave Joey’s family some of her delicious tomatoes, berries, and other vegetables. Still, she was strange, and he was slightly afraid of her. She talked to her plants!”
― Ellen J. Lewinberg, Joey and His Friend Water

“Pull a thread here and you’ll find it’s attached to the rest of the world.”
― Nadeem Aslam, The Wasted Vigil

“My brother asked the birds to forgive him: that sounds senseless, but it is right; for all is like an ocean, all is flowing and blending; a touch in one place sets up movement at the other end of the earth. It may be senseless to beg forgiveness of the birds, but birds would be happier at your side –a little happier, anyway– and children and all animals, if you yourself were nobler than you are now. It’s all like an ocean, I tell you. Then you would pray to the birds too, consumed by an all-embracing love in a sort of transport, and pray that they too will forgive you your sin.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“That which is not good for the swarm, neither is it good for the bee.

- Book VI, 54.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“The abruptness of life's disruptive events can remind us of our vulnerability. By acknowledging the inescapability of future occurrences, we can create mental and emotional shelters that allow us to remain grounded, even when life turns chaotic. We realize we are interconnected, which involves cultivating empathy and moral responsibility for those around us. ("Life had taken them by Surprise “)”
― Erik Pevernagie

“It is an occult law moreover, that no man can rise superior to his individual failings without lifting, be it ever so little, the whole body of which he is an integral part. In the same way no one can sin, nor suffer the effects of sin, alone. In reality, there is no such thing as 'separateness' and the nearest approach to that selfish state which the laws of life permit is in the intent or motive.”
― Helena Petrovna Blavatsky

“The fundamental delusion of humanity is to suppose that I am here and you are out there. -Yasutani Roshi, Zen master (1885-1973)”
― Yasutani Roshi

“When a person dies, they cross over from the realm of freedom to the realm of slavery. Life is freedom, and dying is a gradual denial of freedom. Consciousness first weakens and then disappears. The life-processes – respiration, the metabolism, the circulation – continue for some time, but an irrevocable move has been made towards slavery; consciousness, the flame of freedom, has died out.
The stars have disappeared from the night sky; the Milky Way has vanished; the sun has gone out; Venus, Mars and Jupiter have been extinguished; millions of leaves have died; the wind and the oceans have faded away; flowers have lost their colour and fragrance; bread has vanished; water has vanished; even the air itself, the sometimes cool, sometimes sultry air, has vanished. The universe inside a person has ceased to exist. This universe is astonishingly similar to the universe that exists outside people. It is astonishingly similar to the universes still reflected within the skulls of millions of living people. But still more astonishing is the fact that this universe had something in it that distinguished the sound of its ocean, the smell of its flowers, the rustle of its leaves, the hues of its granite and the sadness of its autumn fields both from those of every other universe that exists and ever has existed within people, and from those of the universe that exists eternally outside people. What constitutes the freedom, the soul of an individual life, is its uniqueness. The reflection of the universe in someone's consciousness is the foundation of his or her power, but life only becomes happiness, is only endowed with freedom and meaning when someone exists as a whole world that has never been repeated in all eternity. Only then can they experience the joy of freedom and kindness, finding in others what they have already found in themselves.”
― Vasily Grossman, Life and Fate

“We are taught to believe that the ‘alienation’ that we experience sometimes, when we withdraw from everything or feel alone, is a craving for something sexual, material, or in the physical - and can be cured by popping a pill in most cases. When in Truth, it’s the circuitry within our souls and minds that is hinting to be connected - to real flowing energy - outside of our TVs and computer monitors. What many of us mistaken for depression is actually a need to be understood, or to see desires come to fruition. There is absolutely nothing abnormal about feeling disconnected. Your sensitivity only means you are more human than most. If you cry, you are alive. I’d be more worried if you didn’t.”
― Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem

“In today's world, the elites are growing even more comfortable with one another across national lines, yet at the same time, less comfortable with low-income people who share their nationality. How we create those bonds of community that are truly global as well as national is one of our generation's great challenges.”
― Jacqueline Novogratz, The Blue Sweater: Bridging the Gap Between Rich and Poor in an Interconnected World

“Connectedness. One thing leads to another. Often in unexpected ways.”
― Holly Goldberg Sloan, Counting by 7s

“Quoting geneticists, Guy Murcia says we’re all family. You have at least a million relatives as close as tenth cousin, and no one on Earth is further removed than your fiftieth cousin. Murcia also describes out kinship though an analysis of how deeply we share the air. With each breath, you take into your body 10 sextillion atoms, and-owing to the wind’s ceaseless circulation- over a year’s time you have intimate relations with oxygen molecules exhaled by every person alive, as well as everyone who ever lived. (The Seven Mysteries of Life)”
― Rob Brezsny, Pronoia is the Antidote for Paranoia: How the Whole World is Conspiring to Shower You With Blessings

“Most ecofeminists reject dichotomies and hierarchies as alien to the natural world – nature is interconnections.”
― Lisa Kemmerer, Sister Species: Women, Animals and Social Justice

“When we help another, we are helped. If we harm another, we harm ourselves. Perhaps harder to grasp—if we harm ourselves, we harm the whole universe.”
― Rachel Wooten, Tara

“Our minds swell into each other like a million currents at sea. We merge, we converge. Everyone flows into everyone else with our even realizing. Even cockroaches play their part. We aren't just a person, we aren't just a gender, we aren't just an age, we aren't just a nationality, we aren't even just a species. The walls between us are imaginary. The thoughts we have that are ours are gloriously unique but also gloriously in the same continuing spectrum. Love, fear, grief, guilt, forgiveness. These are the standard in the repertoire. These are the cover versions we get to play. But to be alive is to be a life. To be life. We are life. The same ever evolving life. We need each other. We are here for each other. The pain of life is life. All life. We need to look after each other. And when it feels like we are truly, deeply alone, that is the moment when we need to do something in order to remember how we connect.”
― Matt Haig, The Life Impossible

“To harm nature is to harm yourself. To care for it is to care not just for yourself, but for the entire universe.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson, These Words Pour Like Rain

“Hope is bubbling
in the ocean of our collective lives...

I can feel the hope bubbling inside,
popping little pockets of air
rising to the surface.

I try to suppress them--
too soon, unsure, can't afford to risk--
but why?
And why would I want to?
Those bubbles pop joy into the air,
spring action to life,
and they feel so good,
massaging the soul.”
― Shellen Lubin

“The older you get, the less linear your memories, and the more everything seems to circle back to something else.”
― Liane Moriarty, Here One Moment

“We cannot see
The still great womb of the world -
No man beholds is mother's womb -
Yet who denies it's there? Coiled
To the navel of the world is that
Endless cord that links us all
To the great origin. If I lose my way
The trailing cord will bring me to the roots.”
― Wole Soyinka, Death and the King's Horseman

“You see, in this magical tapestry, threads of myself are intrinsically woven within the seams of all else. I cannot help but marvel at the complexity of these interconnections.”
― Lavinia Busch, Mystic Cookie

“You can run from your past, but your mistakes? They always follow in the form of a death day.”
― Samraat Singh, A Death Day: Spin-Off

“Human's greatest attribute lies not in the heart nor the brain, but in the potential of overcoming fear while nurturing love.”
― Zephyr McIntyre

“Countless more Makateans lived elsewhere than lived on Makatea.”
― Richard Powers, Playground

“There is an unseen dynamic world in and around us that scientists have only just started to scratch its surface. It is a massive web of energy that interconnects us all, and all that is, for the best and the worst, and in between.”
― Claudys Kantara, Rebel Thoughts of Wisdom: Inspiring Conscious Change for Personal & Collective Growth

“You don’t hover above reality. You’re tangled in it, shaping it as it shapes you.”
― David Maze, 9 Analogies of Consciousness

“Every piece of you holds the whole—not as poetry, but as fact.”
― David Maze, 9 Analogies of Consciousness