#Interconnectedness Quotes

“Cause and effect are two sides of one fact.”

“The astronomers said, 'Give us matter and a little motion and we will construct the universe. It is not enough that we should have matter, we must also have a single impulse, one shove to launch the mass and generate the harmony of the centrifugal and centripetal forces.' ... There is no end to the consequences of the act. That famous aboriginal push propagates itself through all the balls of the system, and through every atom of every ball.”

“Nor knowest thou what argument Thy life to thy neighbor's creed has lent. All are needed by each one; Nothing is fair or good alone.”

“We first share the life by which things exist, and afterwards see them as appearances in nature, and forget that we have shared their cause.”

“Herein is the explanation of the analogies, which exist in all the arts. They are the re-appearance of one mind, working in many materials to many temporary ends. Raphael paints wisdom, Handel sings it, Phidias carves it, Shakspeare writes it, Wren builds it, Columbus sails it, Luther preaches it, Washington arms it, Watt mechanizes it. Painting was called "silent poetry," and poetry "speaking painting." The laws of each art are convertible into the laws of every other.”

“Everything is made of one hidden stuff.”

“The Same, the Same: friend and foe are of one stuff; the ploughman, the plough, and the furrow, are of one stuff; and the stuff is such, and so much, that the variations of form are unimportant.”

“The ocean is a large drop; a drop is a small ocean.”

“The world globes itself in a drop of dew.”

“There is a window between heart and heart:They are never separate like two bodies.Two lamps may not be united in their form -But their light merges into each other.”

“You can't choose up sides on a round world.”

“By fate, not option, frugal Nature gave One scent to hyson and to wall-flower, One sound to pine-groves and to water-falls, One aspect to the desert and the lake. It was her stern necessity : all things Are of one pattern made; bird, beast, and flower, Song, picture, form, space, thought, and character Deceive us, seeming to be many things, And are but one.”

“We are participants, whether we would or not, in the life of the world.... We are partners with the rest. What affects mankind isinevitably our affair as well as the nations of Europe and Asia.”

“No task, rightly done, is truly private. It is part of the world s work.”

“A chain is no stronger than its weakest link, and life is after all a chain.”

“We with our lives are like islands in the sea... The islands also hang together through the ocean's bottom.”

“We with our lives are like islands in the sea, or like trees in the forest... But the trees also commingle their roots in the darkness underground.”

“So inscrutable is the arrangement of causes and consequences in this world, that a two-penny duty on tea, unjustly imposed in a sequestered part of it, changes the condition of all its inhabitants.”

“Our lives are like islands in the sea, or like trees in the forest. The maple and the pine may whisper to each other with their leaves ... But the trees also commingle their roots in the darkness underground, and the islands also hang together through the ocean's bottom.”

“And a summit and flower there is the feeling they have for each other,And they are to branch boundlessly out of that lesson until it becomes omnific,And until one and all shall delight us, and we them.”

“In the vast cosmical changes, the universal life comes and goes in unknown quantities, ... sowing an animalcule here, crumbling a star there, oscillating and ... entangling, from the highest to the lowest, all activities in the obscurity of a dizzying mechanism, hanging the flight of an insect upon the movement of the earth... Enormous gearing, whose first motor is the gnat, and whose last wheel is the zodiac.”

“Behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern; that we—I mean all human beings—are connected with this; that the whole world is a work of art; that we are parts of the work of art. Hamlet or a Beethoven quartet is the truth about this vast mass that we call the world. But there is no Shakespeare, there is no Beethoven; certainly and emphatically there is no God; we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself.”

“Who then understands the reciprocal flux and reflux of the infinitely great and the infinitely small, the echoing of causes in the abysses of being, and the avalanches of creation?”

“There is no object so soft but it makes a hub for the wheeled universe.”

“Nothing is really small; whoever is open to the deep penetration of nature knows this.”

“I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars.”

“No man can help another without helping himself.”

“Every book is a quotation; and every house is a quotation out of all forests, and mines, and stone quarries; and every man is a quotation from all his ancestors.”

“Phenomena intersect; to see but one is to see nothing.”

“One link in a chain explains the infinite chain.”

“[T]he small is great, the great is small; all is in equilibrium in necessity.”

“One atom in this universe cannot move without dragging the whole world along with it. There cannot be any progress without the whole world following in the wake, and it is becoming every day dearer that the solution of any problem can never be attained on racial, or national, or narrow grounds.”

“For if one link in nature's chain might be lost, another might be lost, until the whole of things will vanish by piecemeal.”

“External nature is only internal nature writ large.”

“Even when tied in a thousand knots, the string is still but one.”

“I hear, Western people say, "The world was created for us." If tigers could write books, they would say, man was created for them and that man is a most sinful animal, because he does not allow him (the tiger) to catch him easily. The worm that crawls under your feet today is a God to be.”

“Every atom is trying to go and join itself to the next atom. Atoms after atoms combine, making huge balls, the earths, the suns, the moons, the stars, the planets. They in their turn, are trying to rush towards each other, and at last, we know that the whole universe, mental and material, will be fused into one.”

“I don’t know why; when I look at you, I see myself”

“Even though you tie a hundred knots, the string remains one.”

“Walk to the well.Turn as the earth and the moon turn,circling what they love.Whatever circles comes from the center.”

“I love myself...I love you. I love you...I love myself.”

“The rain comes when the wind calls.”

“You know we're constantly taking. We don't make most of the food we eat, we don't grow it, anyway. We wear clothes other people make, we speak a language other people developed, we use a mathematics other people evolved and spent their lives building. I mean we're constantly taking things. It's a wonderful ecstatic feeling to create something and put it into the pool of human experience and knowledge.”

“Every time you wink the stars move.”

“I claim that human mind or human society is not divided into watertight compartments called social, political and religious. All act and react upon one another.”

“The branch might seem like the fruit's origin:In fact, the branch exist because of the fruit.”

“Oh sky, without me, do not change, Oh moon, without me, do not shine; Oh earth, without me, do not grow, Oh time, without me, do not go. ...Oh, you cannot go, without me.”

“Everything in Nature contains all the powers of Nature. Everything is made of one hidden stuff.”

“The perch swallows the grub-worm, the pickerel swallows the perch, and the fisherman swallows the pickerel; and so all the chinks in the scale of being are filled.”

“The sea-shore is a sort of neutral ground, a most advantageous point from which to contemplate this world. It is even a trivial place. The waves forever rolling to the land are too far-travelled and untamable to be familiar. Creeping along the endless beach amid the sun-squall and the foam, it occurs to us that we, too, are the product of sea-slime.”