Jean Vanier Quotes

Kindness is the connection that links us all together and strengthens the bonds within our communities, neighborhoods, and families.

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 a word in South Africa - Ubuntu - that describes his greatest gift: his recognition that we are all bound together in ways that can be invisible to the eye; that there is a oneness to humanity; that we achieve ourselves by sharing ourselves with others, and caring for those around us.

In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers.

At times I feel myself overtaken by an immense tenderness for these people around me who live in the same century.

It is not the perfect, but the imperfect, who have need of love.

Community is first of all a quality of the heart. It grows from the spiritual knowledge that we are alive not for ourselves but for one another.

I actually have come to believe that if people were more connected to their fellow human beings, if we all felt more centred and fulfilled in our lives, maybe we would be pointing our cameras at a lot less social ills.

The sea rises, the light fails, lovers cling to each other and children cling to us. The moment we cease to hold each other, the moment we break faith with one another, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out.

In all people I see myself - none more, and not one a barleycorn less; And the good or bad I say of myself, I say of them.

Where I come from, there's no common enemy, there's no "why." There's no, "I hate white people."

I am the product of many whose lives have touched mine, from the famous, distinguished, and powerful to the little known and the poor.

We all need one another; much and often. Just as every human creature needs a place to be alone in, a sacred, private "home" of his own, so all human creatures need a place to be together in, from the two who can show each other their souls uninterruptedly, to the largest throng that can throb and stir in unison.

Imperfections are not inadequacies; they are reminders that we're all in this together.

Let us respect others no one lives alone in a city, a nation, or a world.

At a fundamental level, as human beings, we are all the same; each one of us aspires to happiness and each one of us does not wish to suffer. This is why, whenever I have the opportunity, I try to draw people's attention to what as members of the human family we have in common and the deeply interconnected nature of our existence and welfare.

We don't think of our flaws as the glue that binds us to the people we love, but they are. Grace only sticks to your imperfections.

People are human. There's such a premium today on being perfect. That's just not the way people are.

I’ve always sort of preferred people who are not entirely likable.

All mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated....As therefore the bell that rings to a sermon, calls not upon the preacher only, but upon the congregation to come: so this bell calls us all....No man is an island, entire of itself...any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

We weren't friends[...]We were more like jigsaw pieces, each of us part of the same big picture. There are people like this wherever you go. They are part of the same mystery as you are, but you can't quite tell how you fit together. The world is a puzzle, and we can't solve it alone.

Humanity in its basic form is co-humanity.

We can only be human together.

You know when ubuntu is there, and it is obvious when it is absent. It has to do with what it means to be truly human, to know that you are bound up with others in the bundle of life.

If we look long enough and hard enough ... we will begin to see the connections that bind us together, and when we recognize those connections, we will begin to change the world.