Edward Everett Hale Quotes

One thing about living in a small town, I knew everybody and everybody knew me.

I have lived most of my life in small towns, and I'm in the habit of knowing and talking to everyone.

It used to be that you knew your neighbors and maybe your coworkers - the people in your physical vicinity.

Men are not tied together by papers and seals. They are led to associate by resemblances, by conformities, by sympathies.

Society than solitude is worse, And man to man is still the greatest curse.

The problem isn't to learn to love humanity, but to learn to love those members of it who happen to be at hand.

Every social need, such as the need for friendship, must be a party to its own satisfaction: I cannot passively find my friend as a ready-made friend; a ready-made human being he may be, but his friendship for me I must help to create by my own active resolve.

The beauty of any city is really the people within it and the people that you're close to.

To a heart formed for friendship and affection the charms of solitude are very short-lived.

What makes something better is connection.

In the past, friendship was a huge thing. But it's hard for us to think of friendship as a calling, because it's not a vocation.

A live show is one of the last holdouts of a thing that makes you feel a part of a community, where you'll go and maybe meet your future wife or boyfriend, or you're taking your sister to her first show. These are the things that you remember later in your life.

We live in community, and we're created in community. We're created out of the unity of two people, and then we're made into a family. It's just inherent in who we are.

Your great mistake is to act the drama as if you were alone.

Human relationships always help us to carry on because they always presuppose further developments, a future - and also because we live as if our only task was precisely to have relationships with other people.

We don't really make friends, they make us.

I'm not a spiritual person at all, but I do think that the world doesn't have to be as lonely as it is.

It is the individual who is not interested in his fellow men who has the greatest difficulties in life and provides the greatest injury to others. It is fro+m among such individuals that all human failures spring.

I am naive enough to read incessantly because I cannot, on my own, get to know enough people profoundly enough.

In writing ... remember that the biggest stories are not written about wars, or about politics, or even murders. The biggest stories are written about the things which draw human beings closer together.

We are born helpless. As soon as we are fully conscious we discover loneliness. We need others physically, emotionally, and intellectually. We need them if we are to know anything, even ourselves.

We might not know we are seeking people who best enrich our lives, but somehow on a deep subconscious level we absolutely are. Whether the bond is temporary or permanent, whether it succeeds or fails, fate is simply a configuration of choices that combine with others to shape the relationships that surround us. We cannot choose our family, but we can choose our friends, and we sometimes, before we even meet them.

I love a small dinner party - let's say six people, max, were everybody's having the same conversation. That's my favorite thing in the world.

I don't doubt that a man can live perfectly well on his own, but I'm convinced that he begins to die as soon as he closes the door of his house behind him.

Most people are participating in the grand adventure of living with one another.