When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find
it hitched to everything else in the Universe. -Muir
A human being is part of a whole, called by us the
‘Universe’ —a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his
thoughts, and feelings, 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 us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our
circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature
in its beauty.
-Einstein
All things are connected.
Whatever befalls the earth
Befalls the sons of the earth.
Man did not weave the web of life,
He is merely a strand in it.
Whatever he does to the web,
He does to himself. - Chief Seattle
We should free ourselves from the
narrowness of being related only to those familiar to us, either by the fact
that they are blood relations or, in a larger sense, that we eat the same food,
speak the same language, and have the same “ common sense.” Knowing men in the
sense of compassionate and empathetic knowledge requires that we get rid of the
narrowing ties of a given society, race or culture and penetrate to the depth
of that human reality in which we are all nothing but human. True compassion
and knowledge of man has been largely underrated as a revolutionary factor in
the development of man, just as art has been. It is a noteworthy phenomenon that
in the development of capitalism and its ethics, compassion (or mercy) ceases
to be a virtue.
― Erich Fromm,
The Revolution of Hope:
Toward a Humanized Technolog
To be whole. To be complete.
Wildness reminds us what it means to be human, what we are connected to rather
than what we are separate from. -Terry Tempest Williams
-Cormac McCarthy
The Crossing
The Crossing