Community Quotes - Page 4

There is no commerce without community. And there is no community without commerce

When spiritual friends share their stories, the others listen without working. They rest. There’s nothing to fix, nothing to improve. A spiritual community feels undisturbed quiet as they listen, certainly burdened . . . but still resting in the knowledge that the life within, the passion for holiness, is indestructible. It needs only to be nourished and released.

Every story is an act of trust between a writer and a reader: each story, in the end, is social. Whatever a writer sets down can help or harm a community of which he or she is a part. When I write I can imagine a child in California wishing to give away what he’s just seen- a wild animal fleeing though creosote cover in the desert, casting a bright-eyed backward glance or three lines of overheard conversation that seem to contain everything we need understand to repair the gaping rift between body and soul. I look back at that boy turning in glee beneath his pigeons and know it can take a lifetime to convey what you mean, to find the opening. You watch, you set it down. Then you try again.

Ever console or scold people hurt in human relationships that satisfaction comes from God alone? Stop. Adam's fellowship with God was perfect, and God Himself declared Adam needed other humans.

We must delight in each other, make others conditions our own, rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together, always having before our eyes our commission and community in the work, our community as members of the same body.

Our present idea of freedom is only the freedom to do as we please: to sell ourselves for a high salary, a home in the suburbs, and idle weekends. But that is a freedom dependent upon affluence, which is in turn dependent upon the rapid consumption of exhaustible supplies. The other kind of freedom is the freedom to take care of ourselves and of each other. The freedom of affluence opposes and contradicts the freedom of community life.

By acknowledging and accepting the ultimate commonality, we can naturally and voluntarily develop the attitude of compassion and benevolence toward other people, other life-forms, and all beings. We will want to live for the good of all because we know that's the way we benefit ourselves, too.

Our lack of community is intensely painful. A TV talk show is not community. A couple of hours in a church pew each Sabbath is not community. A multinational corporation is neither a human nor a community, and in the sweatshops, defiled agribusiness fields, genetic mutation labs, ecological dead zones, the inhumanity is showing. Without genuine spiritual community, life becomes a struggle so lonely and grim that even Hillary Clinton has admitted "it takes a village".

Once again, we are reminded that awakening, or enlightenment is not the property of Buddhism, any more than Truth is the property of Christianity. Neither the Buddha nor the Christ belongs exclusively to the communities that were founded in their names. They belong to all people of goodwill, all who are attentive to the secret which lives in the depths of their breath and their consciousness. (14)

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.

If man is to survive, he will have learned to take a delight in the essential differences between men and between cultures. He will learn that differences in ideas and attitudes are a delight, part of life's exciting variety, not something to fear.

It is in community where we find our very selves.

But for a Christian, there are, strictly speaking, no chances. A secret Master of Ceremonies has been at work. Christ, who said to the disciples, 'Ye have not chosen me, but I have chosen you,' can truly say to every group of Christian friends, 'You have not chosen one another, but I have chosen you for one another.' The friendship is not a reward for our discrimination and good taste in finding one another out. It is the instrument by which God reveals to each the beauties of all the others...At this feast it is He who has spread the board and it is He who has chosen the guests. it is He, we may dare to hope, who sometimes does, and always should preside. Let us not reckon without our Host.

Had his own way of praying, he had said; that old excuse. As if we were meant to be solitary. As if the church were not about holding the community together, as this sinful one needed.

Empowered Women 101: A confident woman doesn't make her whole life purpose her man. She understands that he is her counter part to achieving whatever she is to accomplish on this earth with the blessings and talents God has given her. He is part of the plan, not the whole plan.

Often I'll go outside and just place my hands on the soil, even if there's no work to do on it. When I am filled with worries, I do that and I can feel the energy of the mountains and of the trees.

We are communities in time and in a place, I know, but we are communities in faith as well - and sometimes time can stop shadowing us. Our lives are touched by those who lived centuries ago, and we hope that our lives will mean something to people who won't be alive until centuries from now. It's a great "chain of being," someone once told me, and I think our job is to do the best we can to hold up our small segment of the chain connected, unbroken. Our arms are linked - we try to be neighbors of His, and to speak up for his principles. That's a lifetime's job.

People want to do something to make the world a better place. They will help when they are invited to.

Network Gives You Reach… Community Gives You Power!

Rough as life can be, I know in my bones we are supposed to stick around and play our part. Even if that part is coughing to death from cigarettes, or being blown up young in a house with your mother watching. And even if it's to be that mother. Someone down the line might need to know you got through it. Or maybe someone you won't see coming will need you. Like a kid who asks you to help him clean motel rooms. Or some ghost who drifts your way, hungry. And good people might even ask you to marry them. And it might be you never know the part you played, what it meant to someone to watch you make your way each day. Maybe someone or something is watching us all make our way. I don't think we get to know why. It is, as Ben would say about most of what I used to worry about, none of my business.

Networks Connect... Communities Care!

Shame often causes me to hide my mistakes from others. But really, when I make a mistake, I should make it loud and clear, so I can see that it didn’t work as a strategy, and be able to make a course correction, either by myself or with the help of others.

If you possess enough courage to speak out what you are, you will find you are not alone.

A forest is not a wilderness, but a community of souls who speak to one another on the wind.

The author says crises tend to reveal the connectivity of systems that had previously been study only in isolation.

Century after century, the belief that an individual’s physical health was independent of his or her emotional health has so dominated medical thought that there has even been open contempt for anyone who would dare to claim that a person’s physical well-being is the sum of its internal and external influences.

George Foreman looks as if he might have organically appeared out of the very ground around the church.

Moderate giftedness has been made worthless by the printing press and radio and television and satellites and all that. A moderately gifted person who would have been a community treasure a thousand years ago has to give up, has to go into some other line of work, since modern communications put him or her into daily competition with nothing but the world's champions.

Someone told me recently that a commentator or some sort had said, "The United States is in spiritual free-fall." When people make such remarks, such appalling judgements, they never include themselves, their friends, those with whom they agree. They have drawn, as they say, a bright line between an "us" and a "them." Those on the other side of the line are assumed to be unworthy of respect or hearing, and are in fact to be regarded as a huge problem to the "us" who presume to judge "them." This tedious pattern has repeated itself endlessly through human history and is, as I have said, the end of community and the beginning of tribalism.

Man does not live by bread alone.

Our task over the next few generations is to transform the world of independent states in which we live into some sort of genuine international community. If we succeed in creating that community, however quarrelsome, discontented, and full of injustice it probably will be, then we shall effectively have abolished the ancient institution of warfare. Good riddance.

You may say that I am just another outdated old man complaining about progress and the changes of time. But, you see, I have well considered that possibility myself, and am prepared o submit to correction by anybody who cares about a community, who can show me how the world is improved by that community's dying.

It was the American middle class. No one's house cost more than two or three year's salary, and I doubt the spread in annual wages (except for the osteopath) exceeded more than five thousand dollars. And other than the doctor (who made house calls), the store managers, the minister, the salesman, and the banker, everyone belonged to a union. That meant they worked a forty-hour week, had the entire weekend off (plus two to four weeks' paid vacation in the summer), comprehensive medical benefits, and job security. In return for all that, the country became the most productive in the world and in our little neighborhood it meant your furnace was always working, your kids could be dropped off at the neighbors without notice, you could run next door anytime to borrow a half-dozen eggs, and the doors to all the homes were never locked -- because who would need to steal anything if they already had all that they needed?

Having been fucked up by my family and community, I’ll never know where my gayness came from, and where it ends and “neurosis” begins. But as a gay person I know I’m a vital element in our civilization.

The most common lie you will ever tell God is your opportunity to do the right thing was taken from you.

Public and civic value require commitment and hard work among the core group of participants. It also requires that these groups be self-governing and submit to constraints that help them ignore distracting and entertaining material and stay focused instead of some sophisticated task.

Community is a context and can either facilitate or inhibit the movement of change for the individual.

The body of Christ is about doing life together, and by doing life together sin is revealed.

It is not the number of prayers that will give you happiness, but the number you answer for another person.

Is there a war on cops? Is there a war on the Black man? Who is going to call a cease fire?

I think "HALLELUJAH" translates into "HALLELUJAH" in every language out there.

In my opinion, if 100% of the people were farming it would be ideal. If each person were given one quarter-acre, that is 1 1/4 acres to a family of five, that would be more than enough land to support the family for the whole year. If natural farming were practiced, a farmer would also have plenty of time for leisure and social activities within the village community. I think this is the most direct path toward making this country a happy, pleasant land.

It is an axiom of modern social psychology that the stories that tend to get repeated are the ones that somehow have the potential to strengthen the communities in which they are told, or to enhance the relationship between the teller and the hearer. This principle seems to be reflected in the stories that were handed down from the community around Jesus. Again and again, early Christian stories suggest that virtue is not enough. The lives of families and communities can only really flourish where virtue takes second place to love.

I experienced the Church to be this refuge within and beyond myself.

I alone cannot change the world, but I can cast a stone across the waters to create many ripples.

Life is hard. Find some really good people to walk through it with. It makes things a little easier.

The struggle against the weakness in yourself is never a solitary struggle. No person can achieve self-mastery or his or her own.

He loved his family, his friends, his writing, his painting; he knew their flaws, but they neither surprised nor embittered him.

Plenty of people will think you're crazy, no matter what you do. Don't let that stop you from finding the people who think you're incredible—the ones who need to hear your voice, because it reminds them of their own. Your tribe. They're out there. Don’t let your critics interfere with your search for them.

Cultural change works orders of magnitude faster then genetic change. Stephen Jay Gould

Isolation is not a healthy ‘coping’ method, it’s like quarantining yourself in a gas chamber!

A proper community, we should remember also, is a commonwealth: a place, a resource, an economy. It answers the needs, practical as well as social and spiritual, of its members - among them the need to need one another. The answer to the present alignment of political power with wealth is the restoration of the identity of community and economy.(pg. 63, "Racism and the Economy")

If colleges are going to justify themselves, they are going to have to thrive at those things that require physical proximity. That includes moral and spiritual development. Very few of us cultivate our souls as hermits. We do it through small groups and relationships and in social contexts.

Having a pleasant time can extend a long period of time to have a fun time.

Garry Shandling has always been a pioneer of… meta entertainment. He's always been a defender of the creative right to use the frame as part of the painting.

Community is not an ideal; it is people. It is you and I. In community we are called to love people just as they are with their wounds and their gifts, not as we want them to be.

The more we love, the more it hurts, and the more we have to let go.

How not to search that space where, for a time span lasting from dusk to dawn, two beings have no other reason to exist than to expose themselves totally to each other- totally, integrally, absolutely- so that their common solitude may appear not in front of their own eyes but in front of ours, yes, how not to look there and how not to rediscover "the negative community, the community of those who have no community"?

Love is our most unifying and empowering common spiritual denominator. The more we ignore its potential to bring greater balance and deeper meaning to human existence, the more likely we are to continue to define history as one long inglorious record of man’s inhumanity to man.

They didn't get the friendships that formed, the community of people who shared in your same joy.