Community proverbs

Page 4

◆ Heroes didn't leap tall buildings or stop bullets with an outstretched hand; they didn't wear boots and capes. They bled, and they bruised, and their superpowers were as simple as listening, or loving. Heroes were ordinary people who knew that even if their own lives were impossibly knotted, they could untangle someone else's. And maybe that one act could lead someone to rescue you right back.

- Jodi Picoult99

◆ What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured.

- Kurt Vonnegut99

◆ Educate a boy, and you educate an individual. Educate a girl, and you educate a community.

- Adelaide Hoodless99

◆ No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were: any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee.

- John Donne99

◆ People use drugs, legal and illegal, because their lives are intolerably painful or dull. They hate their work and find no rest in their leisure. They are estranged from their families and their neighbors. It should tell us something that in healthy societies drug use is celebrative, convivial, and occasional, whereas among us it is lonely, shameful, and addictive. We need drugs, apparently, because we have lost each other.

- Wendell Berry99

◆ The world is so empty if one thinks only of mountains, rivers & cities; but to know someone who thinks & feels with us, & who, though distant, is close to us in spirit, this makes the earth for us an inhabited garden.

- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe99

◆ I know there is strength in the differences between us. I know there is comfort, where we overlap.

- Ani DiFranco99

◆ Strength lies in differences, not in similarities

- Stephen R. Covey99

◆ Once you educate the boys, they tend to leave the villages and go search for work in the cities, but the girls stay home, become leaders in the community, and pass on what they've learned. If you really want to change a culture, to empower women, improve basic hygiene and health care, and fight high rates of infant mortality, the answer is to educate girls.

- Greg Mortenson99

◆ And there are never really endings, happy or otherwise. Things keep going on, they overlap and blur, your story is part of your sister's story is part of many other stories, and there is no telling where any of them may lead.

- Erin Morgenstern99

◆ If man is to survive, he will have learned to take a delight in the essential differences between men and between cultures. He will learn that differences in ideas and attitudes are a delight, part of life's exciting variety, not something to fear.

- Gene Roddenberry99

◆ Pull up a chair. Take a taste. Come join us. Life is so endlessly delicious.

- Ruth Reichl99

◆ The single greatest lesson the garden teaches is that our relationship to the planet need not be zero-sum, and that as long as the sun still shines and people still can plan and plant, think and do, we can, if we bother to try, find ways to provide for ourselves without diminishing the world.

- Michael Pollan99

◆ We have all known the long loneliness and we have learned that the only solution is love and that love comes with community.

- Dorothy Day99

◆ We speak not only to tell other people what we think, but to tell ourselves what we think. Speech is a part of thought.

- Oliver Sacks99