Derrick Bell Quotes

What makes a fulfilling relationship or fulfilling life is not simply found in another. It's found in a group of others.

There is a common theme, though, in the stories I have told, which are usually associations of characters or families that are formed outside of a family circle.

Everything happens through relationships.

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

Our happiness is completely and utterly intertwined with other people: family and friends and neighbors and the woman you hardly notice who cleans your office. Happiness is not a noun or verb. It's a conjunction. Connective tissue.

Man is but a network of relationships and these alone matter to him.

The smallest indivisible human unit is two people, not one; one is a fiction. From such nets of souls societies, the social world, human life springs.

A person is a person through other persons; you can't be human in isolation; you are human only in relationships.

There's no such thing as an independent person.

Friendships are among the most fundamental of human needs.

One of the most important parts of my life has been community.

I don't think about it. I have always been linked up with everybody.

I don't see any independent position that I'm in; it's rather inter-dependent.

A person is a person through other persons. None of us comes into the world fully formed. We would not know how to think, or walk, or speak, or behave as human beings unless we learned it from other human beings. We need other human beings in order to be human. I am because other people are. A person is entitled to a stable community life, and the first of these communities is the family.

There is no such thing as living alone, for all living is relationship; but to live without direct relationship demands high intelligence, a swifter and greater awareness for self-discovery.

No self is of itself alone.

We talk of choosing our friends, but friends are self-elected.

We all possess, like it or not, the people we know, and are possessed by them in turn.

How happy you are depends to a very large degree on your relationships with other people.

We are defined by the places we hold in the web of others’ lives.

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.

Interdependence is a higher value than independence

Life is a system of relations rather than a positive and independent existence; and he who would be happy himself and make others happy must carefully preserve these relations. He cannot stand apart in surly and haughty egoism; let him learn that he is as much dependent on others as others are on him.

The self cannot be self without other selves.

Interdependence is and ought to be as much the ideal of man as self-sufficiency. Man is a social being. Without interrelation with society he cannot realize his oneness with the universe or suppress his egotism. His social interdependence enables him to test his faith and to prove himself on the touchstone of reality.