David Novak Quotes

A self does not amount to much, but no self is an island; each exists in a fabric of relations that is now more complex and mobile than ever before.

In the progress of personality, first comes a declaration of independence, then a recognition of interdependence.

A person is not merely a single subject distinguished from all the others. It is especially a being to which is attributed a relative autonomy in relation to the environment with which it is most immediately in contact.

We all act as hinges-fortuitous links between other people.

Nobody exists in a vacuum.

Communication is a continual balancing act, juggling the conflicting needs for intimacy and independence. To survive in the world, we have to act in concert with others, but to survive as ourselves, rather than simply as cogs in a wheel, we have to act alone.

There's no such thing as an independent person.

We are, first of all, not solitary creatures and second of all, we are deeply embedded in the lives of others. It's very easy to forget that and to engage in an atomistic fallacy - where we think that all we have to do is study the individual components of a system in order to understand the system.

No man is an island. No man stands alone.

No one person is an island.

All human beings are interconnected, one with all other elements in creation.

It has often struck me that the relation of two important members of the social body to one another has never been sufficiently considered, or treated of, so far as I know, either by the philosopher or the poet.

Everybody is someone else's instrument.

There is no such thing as the State And no one exists alone; Hunger allows no choice To the citizen or the police We must love one another or die.

No man is an Island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.

If I am all mankind, are they themselves without me?

The central law of all wholesome life is reciprocity, mutuality. ... But the group is valuable only as it permits personalities, not automatons, to emerge.

Other people may complicate our lives, but life without them would be unbearably desolate. None of us can be truly human in isolation. The qualities that make us human emerge only in the ways we relate to other people.

We human beings are social beings. We come into the world as the result of others’ actions. We survive here in dependence on others. Whether we like it or not, there is hardly a moment of our lives when we do not benefit from others’ activities. For this reason, it is hardly surprising that most of our happiness arises in the context of our relationships with others.

No self is of itself alone.

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

No one acts or experiences in a vacuum.

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.

I am because other people are.

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.