Kinship Quotes

“What if we ceased to pledge our allegiance to the bottom line and stood, instead, with those who line the bottom?”
― Gregory Boyle, Barking to the Choir: The Power of Radical Kinship

“Human beings are settlers, but not in the pioneer sense. It is our human occupational hazard to settle for little. We settle for purity and piety when we are being invited to an exquisite holiness. We settle for the fear-driven when love longs to be our engine. We settle for a puny, vindictive God when we are being nudged always closer to this wildly inclusive, larger-than-any-life God. We allow our sense of God to atrophy. We settle for the illusion of separation when we are endlessly asked to enter into kinship with all.”
― Gregory Boyle, Barking to the Choir: The Power of Radical Kinship

“The animal does not rebel against its own kind. Consider animals: how just they are, how well-behaved, how they keep to the time-honored, how loyal they are to the land that bears them, how they hold to their accustomed routes, how they care for their young, how they go together to pasture, and how they draw one another to the spring. There is not one that conceals its overabundance of prey and lets its brother starve as a result. There is not one that tries to enforce its will on those of its own kind. Not a one mistakenly imagines that it is an elephant when it is a mosquito. The animal lives fittingly and true to the life of its species, neither exceeding nor falling short of it.

He who never lives his animal must treat his brother like an animal. Abase yourself and live your animal so that you will be able to treat your brother correctly. You will thus redeem all those roaming dead who strive to feed on the living. And do not turn anything you do into a law, since that is the hubris of power.”
― Carl Jung, The Red Book: Liber Novus

“In that sense, this is not a standard book of interviews. Nor is it what you might call a book of 'celebrity conversations.' What I was searching for - with increasing clarity as the sessions progressed - was something akin to the heart's natural resonance. What I did my best to hear, of course, was that resonance coming from Ozawa's heart. After all, in our conversations I was the interviewer and he was the interviewee. But what I often heard at the same time was the resonance of my own heart. At times that resonance was something I recognized as having long been a part of me, and at other times it came as a complete surprise. In other words, through a kind of sympathetic vibration that occurred during all of these conversations, I may have been simultaneously discovering Seiji Ozawa and, bit by bit, Haruki Murakami.”
― Haruki Murakami, Absolutely on Music: Conversations with Seiji Ozawa

“Certainly If John moschos where to come back today it is likely that he would find much more than that was familiar and the practices of a modern Muslim Sufi then he would with those of, say, a contemporary American evangelical. Yet the simple truth has been lost by our tendency to think of Christianity as a western religion rather than the Oriental faith it actually is. Moreover the modern demonization of Islam in the west, and the recent growth of Muslim fundamentalism (itself in many ways a reaction to the West's repeated humiliation of the Muslim world), have led to an atmosphere where few are aware of, or indeed wish to be aware of, the profound kinship of Christianity and Islam.”
― William Dalrymple, From the Holy Mountain: A Journey Among the Christians of the Middle East

“Even upon the waters of trial and tribulation, by building the ships of kinship, fellowship, leadership and mentorship, we become unsinkable.”
― Brian S Woods, The Codex Bellum III: The Observer Effect

“It takes more than wings to release one from the bonds of kinship.”
― Betsy Tobin, Ice Land

“Starting a business with brother either ends business or ends brotherhood.”
― Amit Kalantri

“I have met many different people in the course of my life, some of whom I have come to know pretty well, but where these three traits are concerned, I had never encountered anyone before Seiji Ozawa with whom I found it so easy and natural to identify. In that sense, he is a precious person to me. It sets my mind at ease to know that there is someone like him in the world.”
― Haruki Murakami, Absolutely on Music: Conversations with Seiji Ozawa

“True kinship takes a warm heart. In essence, it is about being together, deeply honestly. We talk about love so much but we forget that it is something we give rather than get: a way of being. -Ilse Crawford”
― Louisa Thomsen Brits, The Book of Hygge: The Danish Art of Living Well

“The real comfort is in seeing our kinsmen, no matter how we dislike them, but at least we're their belonging.”
― Shiv Sangal, S

“In the outworks of our lives, we were almost strangers, but we shared a certain outlook on human life and human destiny, which, from the very first, made a bond of extreme strength . . . . At our very first meeting, we talked with continually increasing intimacy. We seemed to sink through layer after layer of what was superficial, till gradually both reached the central fire. It was an experience unlike any other that I have known. We looked into each other's eyes, half appalled and half intoxicated to find ourselves together in such a region. The emotion was as intense as passionate love, and at the same time all-embracing. I came away bewildered, and hardly able to find my way among ordinary affairs.”
― Bertrand Russell, Portraits From Memory and Other Essays

“All women is brothers,' Burley Coulter used to say, and then look at you with a dead sober look as if he didn't know why you thought that was funny. But, as usual, he was telling the truth. Or part of it.”
― Wendell Berry, Hannah Coulter

“There is a rope that stretches from Infinity to Infinity, passing over a razor which is the Present. If the rope is cut, both ends fall away from the middle and the rope is no more. If the man alive now dies without heir, the whole continuum of ancestors and unborn descendants dies with him... His existence as an individual is necessary but insignificant beside his existence as the representative of the whole”
― Hugh Baker

“Kinship. Could they guess how indescribably exotic that was after the barren, selfish world in which she'd spent her life, like a potted plant that had never seen the real sun, nor the real earth, nor heard the rain except against double-paned glass?”
― Anne Rice, The Witching Hour

“Both commensality, the act of eating together, and the sharing of food are powerful means by which human beings create, express, and solidify feelings of mutual trust, intimacy, and kinship.”
― Naomi Leite, Unorthodox Kin: Portuguese Marranos and the Global Search for Belonging

“Your father lies beneath a stone,' old Aedwen mumbles, dozing at her wheel, and Godric thinks how it's a stone as well they're all beneath. The stone is need and hurt and gall and tongue-tied longing, for that's the stone that kinship always bears, yet the loss of it would press more grievous still.”
― Frederick Buechner, Godric

“Look past our kinship, and towards a romantic relationship!”
― Steven L. Sheppard, Byblis And Caunus

“The rest of the gang aren’t worth mentioning. But every one of them’s got a story.

I catch myself writing ‘not worth mentioning’. According to what criteria? No reason whatever to feel superior.”
― Jacques Yonnet, Paris Noir: The Secret History of a City

“So it was in Botswana, almost everywhere; ties of kinship, no matter how attenuated by distance or time, linked one person to another, weaving across the country a human blanket of love and community. And in the fibres of that blanket there were threads of obligation that meant that one could not ignore the claims of others. Nobody should starve; nobody should feel that they were outsiders; nobody should be alone in their sadness.”
― Alexander McCall Smith

“Every believer, upon receiving Jesus Christ as their Savior, being born anew, immediately has a connection with other believers.”
― Henry Hon, One: Unfolding God’s Eternal Purpose from House to House

“In many cultural contexts, shared emotion is a potent medium through which people come to feel connected and, over time, to see one another as kin.”
― Naomi Leite, Unorthodox Kin: Portuguese Marranos and the Global Search for Belonging

“When you considered act apart from the crowd thus further many people obstacle you most of them are kinships”
― Ronak Naneriya

“Proof

That goldfinches favor
yellow blooms
is proof
that sustenance
comes in a form
resembling, pleasing,
not to be fought for,
but found
like bearings
by a light both
given and sought,
that singular glow.”
― Lia Purpura, It Shouldn't Have Been Beautiful

“Frith is something that underlies all else, deeper than all inclination. It is not a matter of will, in the sense that those who share it again and again choose to set their kinship before all other feelings. It is rather the will itself. It is identical with the actual feeling of kinship, and not a thing deriving from that source.”
― Vilhelm Grønbech, The Culture of the Teutons: Volumes 1 and 2

“The sentence, that kinskip is identical with humanity, which at first sight seemed a helpful metaphor, has now revealed itself as nothing but the literal truth. All that we find in a human being bears the stamp of kinship. In mere externals, a man can find no place in the world save as a kinsman, as member of some family — only the nidings are free and solitary beings. And the very innermost core of a man, his conscience, his moral judgement, as well as his wisdom and prudence, his talents and will, have a certain family stamp. As soon as the man steps out of the frith and dissociates himself from the circle into which he was born, he has no morality, neither any consciousness of right, nor any guidance for his thoughts. Outside the family, or in the intervals between families, all is empty. Luck, or as we perhaps might say, vitality, is not a form of energy evenly distributed; it is associated with certain centres, and fills existence as emanations from these vital points, the families.”
― Vilhelm Grønbech, The Culture of the Teutons: Volumes 1 and 2

“The power to live comes from within, pouring out from a central spring in the little circle, and thence absorbing the world. In order to fill his place as a man, the Germanic individual must first of all be a kinsman. The morality, sense of right and sense of law that holds him in his place as member of a state
community, as one of a band of warriors, or of a religious society, is dependent upon his feelings as a kinsman; the greater his clannishness, the firmer will be his feeling of community, for his loyalty cannot be other than the sense of frith applied to a wider circle.”
― Vilhelm Grønbech

“Through innumerable kinships, natures are knit together this way and that, until the world hangs in a web of frith. So man draws souls into his circle. For the present age, the war-cry is: rule. Be master of the earth, subdue creation is the watch-word running through our time, and it looks as if this commandment sympathetically strikes the heart-note of our culture and ever sets the pace not only for its actions but also for its speculations. All hypotheses anent past ages
in the history of our race hinge on the assumption that man has made his way
through an everlasting battle, and that civilization is the outcome of man's
struggle for existence. But modern civilization with its cry for mastery and its
view of life as a continuous strife is too narrow a base for hypotheses to make
history intelligible. The evolutionary theory of an all-embracing struggle for food and survival is only an ætiological myth, as the ethnologists have it, a simple contrivance to explain modern European civilization by throwing our history, its competition and its exclusive interest in material progress back on the screen of the past. When ancient and primitive cultures are presented in the light of
modern economical problems, all the proportions and perspectives are
disturbed; some aspects are thrown into relief, other aspects are pushed into
the shade, without regard to the harmony inherent in the moral and intellectual
life of other peoples; and the view as a whole is far more falsified by such capricious playing of searchlights than by any wilful distorting of facts.”
― Vilhelm Grønbech, The Culture of the Teutons: Volumes 1 and 2

“The key-note of ancient culture is not conflict, neither is it mastery, but conciliation and friendship. Man strives to make peace with the animals, the trees and the powers that be, or deeper still, he wants to draw them into himself and make them kin of his kin, till he is unable to draw a fast line between his own life and that of the surrounding nature. Culture is too complex — and we may add too unprofitable — a thing to be explained by man's toil for the exigencies and sweets of life, and the play of his intellect and imagination has never —until recent times perhaps — been dominated by the quest of food or clothing. The struggle for daily bread and for the maintenance of life until the morrow is generally a very keen one in early society, and it seems that the exertion calls for the exercise of all faculties and powers. But as a creature struggling for food, man is a poor economist; at any rate he is a bad hand at limiting his expenditure of energy to the needs of the day. There is more than exertion in his work; there is an overshooting force, evidence that the energy which drives him is something more complex than the mere instinct of existence. He is urged on by an irresistible impulse to take up the whole of nature in himself, to make it, by his active sympathy, something human, to make it heore.”
― Vilhelm Grønbech, The Culture of the Teutons: Volumes 1 and 2

“The authority in such a clan-society is of a peculiar sort, it is here, it is there, it is
everywhere, and it never sleeps. But there is no absolutely dominant power. The circle may perhaps have its leader in chief, but he cannot force anyone to his will. In Iceland, this lack of subordination appears in the crudest light. Iceland had men who gladly paid out of their own purse for the extravagances of their restless kinsmen, if only they could maintain peace and prevent futile bloodshed; but their peacemaking was an everlasting patchwork. There was no
power over those who did not seek the right. To take firm action against them was a thing even the most resolute of their kin could never do, for it was out of the question for the clan to disown its unruly members and leave them to the mercy of their enemies. When Chrodin, a man of noble stock, was chosen, for his cleverness and god-fearing ways, to be majordomo in Austria, he declined with these significant words: “I cannot bring about peace in Austria, chiefly
because all the great men in the country are my kinsmen. I cannot overawe them and cannot have any one executed. Nay, because of their very kinship they will rise up and act in defiance.”
― Vilhelm Grønbech, The Culture of the Teutons: Volumes 1 and 2