Erwin McManus Quotes

The ancient human question 'Who am I?' leads inevitably to the equally important question 'Whose am I?' - for there is no self outside of relationship.

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.

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.

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.

I just haven't let myself get to a place where I've felt a part of any kind of a community, so I've always stayed outside of it.

By building relations we create a source of love and personal pride and belonging that makes living in a chaotic world easier.

I like being alone and I think this movie, as much as it is an investigation of connection and people bonding, I also think it's just as much about loneliness.

Everyone desires relationships and community. Most people want to belong to a cohesive, like-minded group. It staves off loneliness. It promotes identity. These are natural and very human instincts.

Everybody needs somebody.

The bird a nest, the spider a web, man friendship.

I had family and friends back home. Just because I could potentially feel alone in Los Angeles, that didn't mean I was alone.

When I meet a new person, I am on the lookout for signs of what he or she is loyal to. It is a preliminary clue to the sense of belonging, and hence of his or her humanity.

For me, I feel like I relate to a lot of people.

I have a big thing about needing to know that I belong - in my group of friends, in my family, in my industry.

Belonging has always been a fundamental driver of humankind.

No one can live without relationship. You may withdraw into the mountains, become a monk, a sannyasi, wander off into the desert by yourself, but you are related. You cannot escape from that absolute fact. You cannot exist in isolation.

In a lot of my films, the biggest theme is family, making families out of those around you.

I never want to feel too far away from people. I think that's when you get in trouble.

Culture in general is important, and people's identify is tied up in it. It's how we connect with others.

The overall concept of 'Only You' is a reflection on the illusion of love, how we confront, understand and manifest our self identities within relationships.

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.

What is family? They were the people who claimed you. In good, in bad, in parts or in whole, they were the ones who showed up, who stayed in there, regardless. It wasn't just about blood relations or shared chromosomes, but something wider, bigger. Cora was right - we had many families over time. Our family of origion, the family we created, as well as the gorups you moved thorugh while all of this was happening: friends, lovers, sometimes even strangers. None of them were perfect, and we couldn't expect them to be. You couldn't make any one person your world. The trick was to take what each could give you and build a world from it.

A lot of my work goes to the center of where we belong--if there is any root to life -because nowadays the family is broken up, and people don't live in the same place for very long.

Strangers are an endangered species.

You can get connections in lots of ways. You can get it by a friendship. You can get it by a dog. You can get it by a child. You can get it by being attached to a cause. You can get it by having huge problems and sharing those problems with other people.