Community Quotes

When I walked into the Christian section of a bookstore, the message was clear: Faith is something you do alone. Rick does not have much tolerance for people living alone. He’s like Bill Clinton in that he feels everyone’s pain. If Rick thinks somebody is lonely, he can’t sleep at night. He wants us all to live with each other and play nice so he can get some rest. Tortured soul.

Cities and landscapes are illustrations of our spiritual and material worth. They not only express our values but give them a tangible reality. They determine the way in which we use or squander our energy, time, and land resources.

Authentic architecture is not the incarnation of the spirit of the age but of the spirit, full stop.

If you’re an Orthodox believer, then what sustains this framework is the obligation that you follow. But if you live in a democratic, liberal world whose motto is: “Make choices and manage your choices according to what is good for you,” then there is a built-in tension between that which connects and that which divides. Between the material and the intellectual or ethical. Materialism is not a dirty word, but in this tension between the individual and the material on the one hand, and the communal and the ethical on the other, we are at the end of an age in which the material and the individual are triumphing.

Howard was almost as fond of this hall as he was of his own shop. The Brownies used it on Tuesdays, and the Women's Institute on Wednesdays. It had hosted jumble sales and Jubilee celebrations, wedding receptions and wakes, and it smelled of all of these things: of stale clothes and coffee urns, and the ghosts of home-baked cakes and meat salads; of dust and human bodies; but primarily of aged wood and stone.

Superabundant piety/righteousness (and its practices) is that form of life that enhances the individual and the community simultaneously.

Michael Joseph Brown

The rigidity of a bottle's form does not affect the fluidity of the liquid it contains.

There is no need for us all to be alike and think the same way, neither do we need a common enemy to force us to come together and reach out to each other. If we allow ourselves and everyone else the freedom to fully individuate as spiritual beings in human form, there will be no need for us to be forced by worldly circumstances to take hands and stand together. Our souls will automatically want to flock together, like moths to the flame of our shared Divinity, yet each with wings covered in the glimmering colors and unique patterns of our individual human expression.

Anthon St. Maarten

Without community, there is no liberation...but community must not mean a shedding of our differences, nor the pathetic pretense that these differences do not exist.

What art should do, I think, is advance the generation into the next era. It should be one step ahead of the ordinary, ahead of what is already known. Art is what pulls on the next age. I’m not saying that my art is that, but that it would be good if it could be.

I thought I should make a place to bring light down into this world. All things that become realities start in that place of someone imagining them.

We may be little, insignificant servants in the eyes of a world motivated by efficiency, control and success. But when we realize that God has chosen us from all eternity, sent us into the world as the blessed ones, handed us over to suffering, can't we, then, also trust that our little lives will multiply themselves and be able to fulfill the needs of countless people?

Henri J.M. Nouwen

She was drowning—in friendliness, in community—and she was starting to think she didn't want to get pulled out.

Our community with one another consists solely in what Christ has done to each of us.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Grammar, he saw, was agreement, community, consensus.

D.T. Max

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.

Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Viewed from a certain distance and under good light, even an ugly city can look like the promised land.

The relationship between any two communities in the global economy is not unlike a marriage. As couples counselors advise, relationships falter when two partners are too interdependent. When any stress affecting one partner - the loss of a job, an illness, a bad-hair day - brings down the other, the couple suffers. A much healthier relationship is grounded in the relative strength of each partner, who each should have his or her own interests, hobbies, friends, and professional identity, so that when anything goes wrong, the couple can support one another from a position of strength. Our ability to love, like our ability to produce, must be grounded in our own security. And our economy, like our love, when it comes from a place of community, can grow without limit.

Michael H. Shuman

I ponder the rhythms of letting go and embracing whatever is around the corner, trusting that the empty spaces will be filled. And knowing that sometimes community can happen only in the gaps where mystery resides.

I wish people used wishes to modify themselves instead of others. Wish to be low maintenance. Wish to be autonomous, even.

I expect the audience to assume TV is stupid. I accept that it's my job to overcome it.

You can't tell the audience — well, you can, but I don't like to tell the audience — that anything they're watching doesn't matter.

The goal of using our voice is not just to be noticed, but with humility to gracefully be fully present in relationships. Deferring to another person does not require that we be ignored; allowing that is cowardice. Hiding, a form of dishonesty, prevents true community.

Rosalie De Rosset

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?

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)

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.

Look at it this way—before any of this wood became parts of the shelves or the desk or the chair, all of it was in pieces—just pieces of wood. But the wood was full of potential. It could be shaped into anything that a carpenter wanted it to be shaped into, turning it into a beautiful finished product. Now, not all carpenters are equal in skill—you know that. If a piece of wood is shaped by a poor carpenter, the finished product will be lacking somehow, in some way."But if that wood is shaped by a master carpenter, then that piece will fit into this world precisely as it’s supposed to fit, whether it be a desktop or a cabinet shelf or a doorstop. And the way that I work wood is the way I try to work with people—with love and attention and caring—so that the wood and the people can reach their potential. And if someone lets you teach them, and is open to what you have to teach, then how can you go wrong?

Tom Walsh

They have taken the idea of nonharming, of gentleness toward the earth, to a very radical level. Even the weeds are not enemies.

As an introverted person, I struggle even writing about community because I know how difficult it often is for me to walk across the room to converse with people. People often drain the energy out of me, and too often I prefer to protect myself rather than engage in relationships with people. For some of us who are more extroverted, community is a way of life, yet I wonder how intentional even the most extroverted person is about making community a holiness-shaping thing. Community with God’s people ultimately shapes us to reflect more of who God is.

Sometimes just to touch the ground is enough for me, even if not a single thing grows from what I plant.

The Latino community anchored me, but I didn't want it to isolate me from the full extent of what Princeton had to offer, including engagement with the larger community. Page 148

Sonia Sotomayor

In the land of the rejected, the field is flattened, open to much oppurtunity. Here flourish the weeds and nonstandard quality alike. No one aspires, because there is no pinnacle to reach — just be better than whoever is next to you. It is basic, fundamental, and often rude, with bonus points for creative solution. Hardly ever about who you are, but how you do, it's "run what you brung" not Formula 1.

If you are a leader or someone who works for the interest of a community, first make sure that you understand the interest of the people who make up that community. In this way, you will have a good chance of minimizing, perhaps, avoiding the us versus them mentality.

To be a librarian is not to be neutral, or passive, or waiting for a question. It is to be a radical positive change agent within your community.

R. David Lankes

Don't be so hard on yourself, don't put pressure on yourself, life is just a chain of experiments and results, and you'll be perfect when you're dead.

My cat brought me a toy. I thanked her and threw it. She sat there gave me a look that made me realize people and dogs are the crazy ones.

All [tv] shows are like cigarettes. You watch two, you have a higher chance of watching three. They're all addictive.

In practice it undermines the transformation of faith. When Christians concentrate their time and energy on their own separate spheres and their own institutions-whether all-absorbing megachurches, Christian yellow-page businesses, or womb-to-tomb Christian cultural ghettoes-they lose the outward thrusting, transforming power that is at the heart of the gospel. Instead of being 'salt' and 'light' -images of a permeating and penetrating action-Christians and Christian institutions become soft and vulnerable to corruption from within.

The dynamism of any diverse community depends not only on the diversity itself but on promoting a sense of belonging among those who formerly would have been considered and felt themselves outsiders.

Sonia Sotomayor

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.

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.

Time is what we have in this life, and how we use it determines what our life is.

The society that embraced him continued to prosper by stressing the family unit and their close-knit community. Hers prospered by forcigng independence and self-sufficiency.

My goal is to draw a line with some 'flavor' to it.

No matter how alone you seem to be right now, just be aware that in this precise moment there are huge amounts of people who totally resonate with you, who share exactly your hopes and desires, who would be most happy to support you, just as you would be happy to support them. Be open to connect with them, and allow them to connect with you.

I think all people want freedom, but they've got this idea inserted into their head about money.

Finally Bill Mixter would lower his head, lay his bow upon the strings, and draw out the first notes of a tune, and the others would come in behind him. The music, while it lasted, brought a new world into being. They would play some tunes they had learned on the radio, but their knowledge was far older than that and they played too the music that was native to the place, or that the people of the place were native to. Just the names of the tunes were a kind of music; they cal l back the music to my mind still, after so many years: "Sand Riffle," "Last Gold Dollar," "Billy in the Low Ground," "Gate to Go Through," and a lot of others. "A fiddle, now, is an atmospheric thing," said Burley Coulter. The music was another element filling the room and pouring out through the cracks. When at last they'd had their fill and had gone away, the shop felt empty, the silence larger than before.

I finally understood that I couldn’t avoid working to provide for myself, but that can also be a wonderfulthing, a beautiful thing.

Unity without uniformity, community without conformity.

A willingness to share our possessions with one another is a very important aspect of true biblical community.

I didn't really understand community until I moved to New Orleans.

Jordan Flaherty

The historian assesses that the investment of the wealthy classes in the Bank of England wedded them to the fate of the nation as a whole and to the maintenance of its stability.

Walter Russell Mead

Practice of true community involves responsibilities and actions that do not come naturally to us.

Biblical community is first of all the sharing of a common life in Christ.

A library is such a potent symbol of a town's values: each one closed down might as well be six thousand stickers plastered over every available surface, reading "WE CHOSE TO BECOME MORE STUPID AND DULL.

Is it not true that in ancient times the worst punishment of all was not death, but banishment?

Jean Said Makdisi

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.

There is only one salvation for you: take yourself up, and make yourself responsible for all the sins of men. For indeed it is so, my friend, and the moment you make yourself sincerely responsible for everything and everyone, you will see at once that it is really so, that it is you who are guilty on behalf of all and for all. Whereas by shifting your own laziness and powerlessness onto others, you will end by sharing in Satan's pride and murmuring against God.The Brothers KaramazovBook VI - The Russian Monk, Chapter 3 - Conversations and Exhortations of Father Zosima.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

I loved the different voices all singing one song, the various tones and qualities, the passing lifts of feeling, rising up and going out forever. Old Man Profet, who was a different man on Sunday, used to draw out the notes at the ends of verses so he could listen to himself, and in fact it sounded pretty.

A godly woman is beyond average because she keeps her word. She honors her vows. She exhibits great faith. She overcomes great obstacles. And she affects her family, her community, even the world.

Elizabeth George

1 2 3 … 13 Next