EXPERIENCE
"You cannot help but learn more as you take the world into your hands. Take it up reverently, for it is an old piece of clay, with millions of thumb prints on it." -John Updike
"Men are wise in proportion, not to their experience but to their capacity for experience." -Bernard Shaw
"To regret ones own experiences is to arrest ones own development. To deny ones own experiences is to put a lie into the lips of ones life. It is no less than a denial of the soul." -Oscar Wilde
"I think we all wish we could erase some dark times in our lives. But all of life's experiences, bad and good, make you who you are. Erasing any of lifes experiences would be a great mistake." -Luis Miguel
"One of the greatest moments in anybody's developing experience is when he no longer tries to hide from himself but determines to get acquainted with himself as he really is." -Norman Vincent Peale
"If you will call your troubles experience, and remember that every experience develops some latent force within you, you will grow vigorous and happy, however adverse your circumstances may seem to be." -John Heywood
HUMANITY
"The person who tries to live alone will not succeed as a human being. His heart withers if it does not answer another heart. His mind shrinks away if he hears only the echoes of his own thoughts and finds no other inspiration." -Pearl S. Buck
"We are not human beings on a spiritual journey. We are spiritual beings on a human journey." -Stephen R. Covey
"Every man is more than just himself; he also represents the unique, the very special and always significant and remarkable point at which the world's phenomena intersect, only once in this way, and never again." -Herman Hesse
"Our humanity is a poor thing, except for the divinity that stirs within us." -Francis Bacon
"Man must realize his own unimportance before he can appreciate his importance." -R.M. Baumgardy
"We cannot despair of humanity, since we ourselves are human beings." -Albert Einstein
"A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his conscioiusness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty." -Albert Einstein
COMMUNITY
"If you have come to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together." -Lila Watson
"I am part of all that I have met." -Alfred Tennyson
"This is the duty of our generation as we enter the twenty-first century -- solidarity with the weak, the persecuted, the lonely, the sick, and those in despair. it is expressed by the desire to give noble and humanizing meaning to the community in which all members will define themselves not by their own identity but by that of others." -Elie Weisel
" The strongest bond of human sympathy outside the family relation should be one uniting working people of all nations and tongues and kindreds." -Abraham Lincoln
"The life I touch for good or ill will touch another life, and that in turn another, until who knows where the trembling stops or in what far place my touch will be felt." -Frederick Buechner
"What cannot be achieved in one lifetime will happen when one lifetime is joined to another." -Harold Kushner
"We are all longing to go home to some place we have never been -- a place half-remembered and half-envisioned we can only catch glimpses of from time to time. Community. Somewhere, there are people to whom we can speak with passion without having the words catch in our throats. Somewhere a circle of hands will open to receive us, eyes will light up as we enter, voices will celebrate with us whenever we come into our own power. Community means strength that joins our strength to do the work that needs to be done. Arms to hold us when we falter. A circle of healing. A circle of friends. Someplace where we can be free." -Starhawk
"The good we secure for ourselves is precarious and uncertain until it is secured for all of us and incorporated into our common life." -Jane Addams
"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has." -Margaret Mead
"In every community there is work to be done. In every nation, there are wounds to heal. In every heart there is power to do it." -Marianne Williamson
"If you were all alone in the universe with no one to talk to no one with which to share the beauty of the stars, to laugh with, to touch, what would be your purpose in life? It is other life, it is love, which gives your life meaning. This is harmony. We must discover the joy of each other, the joy of challenge, the joy of growth." -Mitsugi Saotome
"Living together is an art." -William Pickens
"I have inherited a belief in community, the promise that a gathering of the spirit can both create and change culture. In the desert, change is nurtured even in stone by wind, by water, through time." -Terry Tempest Williams
"Resistance to oppression is often based on a love that leads us to value ourselves, and leads us to hope for more than the established cultural system is willing to grant... such love is far more energizing than guilt, duty, or self-sacrifice. Love for others leads us to accept accountability (in contrast to feeling guilt) and motivates our search for ways to end our complicity with structures of oppression. Solidarity does not require self-sacrifice, but an enlargement of the self to include community with others." -Sharon Welch
