Community Quotes

Networks Connect... Communities Care!

~ Ted Rubin

The church itself is a spiritual director. It tries to connect your story with God's story. Just to be a true part of this community means you are being directed, you are being guided, you are being asked to make connection. The Bible is a spiritual director. People must read Scripture as a word for themselves personally, and ask where God speaks to them. Finally, individual Christians are also spiritual directors. A spiritual director is a Christian man or woman who practices the disciplines of the church and of the Bible and to whom you are willing to be accountable for your life in God.

~ Henri Nouwen

I've got nothing to offer you kids but these noodles. They're good noodles but they won't change the world.

~ Madeleine Thien

Here is the paradox of it: the more of an individual you become the more you realize we are interrelated, that success of one requires the success of all.

~ James Rozoff

Love is an exchange of gifts,' Saint Ignatius had said. It was in these simple, practical, down-to-earth ways that people could show their love for each other. If the love was not there in the beginning, but only the need, such gifts made love grow.

~ Dorothy Day

It’s hopeless, trying to recruit a stranger to help me find someone who’s a stranger to him. But then again, we are all strangers to ourselves, caught up in the monotony of daily life, stuck in our routines, never really stopping to think about what will happen to us if we fall off track.

~ Shannon Mullen

I realized that the story of even so small a place can never be completely told and can never be finished. It is eternal, always here and now, and going on forever.

~ Wendell Berry

The myth of self-sufficiency demands optimism without end, downplays life’s challenges, and shames us when, inevitably, we fall short.

~ Ashton Applewhite

Libraries are, at heart, helpful and kind providers. It is hard for those who perhaps don't feel the need to visit their local libraries to understand what a vital service they provide for communities and individuals who do - and those who do are often the most vulnerable.

~ Robert Popple

This is why I prefer Queens to any other place. The borough of my parents and small business owners is populated by people who know how to work around the system when it tries to fuck you.

~ Jessica Valenti

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

Everywhere in these days men have, in their mockery, ceased to understand that the true security is to be found in social solidarity rather than in isolated individual effort.

~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

I felt as if each person within visual range were slowly draining the life from me. We were all connected, and the more them there were, the more I wanted to crawl under a table and cry.

~ Shaun David Hutchinson

Rather than equating the terms 'local' and 'cosmopolitan' with geographical areas (rural and urban respectively), sociologist Wade Clark Roof suggests that these terms refer to character types who can be found in a diversity of settings in the United States. Locals are strongly oriented toward community or neighborhood, favor commitments to primary groups (family, neighborhood, fraternal and community organizations), tend to personalize their interpretations of social experience, and are more traditional in their beliefs and values. Cosmopolitans, on the other hand, are oriented toward the world outside the residential community, prefer membership in professional or special interest organizations, and are more open to social change and more tolerant of diversity in belief than locals. While a disproportionate number of locals are found in smaller communities, studies indicate that other factors - such as length of residence in a community, age, and educational level - play an even stronger role in determining orientation.

~ Leonora Tubbs Tisdale

Those who are weak have great difficulty finding their place in our society. The image of the ideal human as powerful and capable disenfranchises the old, the sick, the less-abled. For me, society must, by definition, be inclusive of the needs and gifts of all its members. How can we lay claim to making an open and friendly society where human rights are respected and fostered when, by the values we teach and foster, we systematically exclude segments of our population? I believe that those we most often exclude from the normal life of society, people with disabilities, have profound lessons to teach us. When we do include them, they add richly to our lives and add immensely to our world.

~ Jean Vanier

In 7.81 square miles of vaunted black community, the 850 square feet of Dum Dum Donuts was the only place in the community where one could experience the Latin root of the word, where a citizen could revel in common togetherness. So one rainy Sunday afternoon, not long after the tanks and media attention had left, my father ordered his usual. He sat at the table nearest the ATM and said aloud, to no one in particular, Do you know that the average household net worth for whites is $113,149 per year, Hispanics $6,325, and black folks $5,677?For real?What's your source material, nigger?The Pew Research Center.Motherfuckers from Harvard to Harlem respect the Pew Research Center, and hearing this, the concerned patrons turned around in their squeaky plastic seats as best they could, given that donut shop swivel chairs swivel only six degrees in either direction. Pops politely asked the manager to dim the lights. I switched on the overhead projector, slid a transparency over the glass, and together we craned our necks toward the ceiling, where a bar graph titled Income Disparity as Determined by Race hovered overhead like some dark, damning, statistical cumulonimbus cloud threatening to rain on our collective parades.I was wondering what that li'l nigger was doing in a donut shop with a damn overhead projector.

~ Paul Beatty

If you look at every flower individually, they look quite miserable. Put them together in a vase and they become a bouquet and that's quite attractive. I think about our community often in that way

~ Henri J.m. Nouwen

I had to be strong, for every man and woman in our fair community was here to witness my beloved being put to rest, some with satisfaction, and some with relief. But all would gather an accounting of the events here today, to be relayed at future balls and parlour teas, as a comeuppance for my marrying an outsider.

~ Cheryl R Cowtan

When everything is social, suddenly nothing is.

~ Jean Baudrillard

Wherever people gather for selfless ends, there is a vast augmentation of their individual capacities. Something wonderful, something momentous happens. An irresistible force begins to move, which, though we may not see it, is going to change our world.

~ Eknath Easwaran

Accept each other. Love. Even if it is messy. Live with no regrets. Remember that diversity is our strength. We shouldn't be building walls, we should be tearing them down. Accept each other no matter who we love, how we pray or how we look.

~ Johnny Corn

Such is a communityof inviolable immunity, protectedfrom tampering or harpooningmutiny. Every better thinker’s impulse to shrink us (at the shoreline from our lifeblood’s deep pulse) uses disparaging scrutiny to sink us.

~ Kristen Henderson

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.

~ Vironika Tugaleva

By far the greatest and most admirable form of wisdom is that needed to plan and beautify cities and human communities.

~ Socrates

The Cross is the eternal expression of the length to which God will go to in order to restore broken community.

~ Martin Luther King Jr.

The fascist authoritarianism, characterized by sado-masochism and destructiveness, had a function which is comparable psychologically to a neurotic symptom - namely, fascism compensated for powerlessness and individual isolation and protected the individual from anxiety-creating situations. If one compare fascism to a neurotic symptom, it can be said that fascism is a neurotic form of community.

~ Rollo May

Work for purpose, be for others.

~ Worknb

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

~ Richard Wright

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.

~ Shannon L. Alder

[There] is . . . a problem that bedevils all of us as members of communities of believers. I call this problem our disagreement deficit, and it comes in four parts. . . . First, our communities expose us to disproportionate support for our own ideas. Second, they shield us from the disagreement of outsiders. Third, they cause us to disregard whatever outside disagreement we do encounter. Finally, they quash the development of disagreement from within.

~ Kathryn Schulz

In our culture it is seen as a sign of weakness to actually seek help from someone else. And yet, as Christians, God designed us to need each other - He designed us to lean upon the body of Christ for support, prayer, wisdom, and even practical help.

~ Leslie Ludy

Sticks and stones may break your bones, and words – can cut your insides.

~ Jen Pollock Michel

The church has a deep well of joy, of which none can drink but her own children. There are stores of wine, and oil, and corn, hidden in the midst of our Jerusalem, upon which the saints of God are evermore sustained and nurtured; and sometimes, as in our Saviour's case, we have our seasons of intense delight

~ Charles Haddon Spurgeon

Christ's vast benevolence must, from the very nature of things, have afforded Him the deepest possible delight, for benevolence is joy.

~ Charles Haddon Spurgeon

He seemed less in need of a secretary than of someone to listen to him.

~ Barbara W. Tuchman

Excessive gentrification destroys the biodiversity and ecosystem of a community.

~ Khang Kijarro Nguyen

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

~ Philip Zaleski

In the midst of the apparent diversity of human affairs, a certain number of primary facts may be discovered, from which all others are derived.

~ Alexis De Tocqueville

God loves the church with a love too deep for human imagination: He loves her with all His infinite heart. Therefore let her sons be of good courage, she cannot be far from prosperity.

~ Charles Haddon Spurgeon

The sight of big ships, of the many new uniforms, at once serious and cool, left Bush with an overall sense of the navy's power and camaraderie and purpose.

~ H.w. Brands