Walter Bagehot Quotes

Christmas reminds us we are not alone. We are not unrelated atoms, jouncing and ricocheting amid aliens, but are a part of something, which holds and sustains us. As we struggle with shopping lists and invitations, compounded by December's bad weather, it is good to be reminded that there are people in our lives who are worth this aggravation, and people to whom we are worth the same. Christmas shows us the ties that bind us together, threads of love and caring, woven in the simplest and strongest way within the family.

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

No one has really ever defined what a friend is.

The 'block' in 'Attack the Block' is not just a physical thing. It's people; it's families.

You do need people. You can't live without them. We're all interconnected in some way.

We are all dependent on one another, every soul of us on earth.

I believe we are all connected to other people. I am connected to people who are suffering. We all are.

I'm just like everyone. I like to feel togetherness with someone.

One of the signs of passing youth is the birth of a sense of fellowship with other human beings as we take our place among them.

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

Each person is a link, weak or strong, in an endless chain.

There's a difference between good chemistry and a bond. Chemistry is something you have with somebody you meet - or you don't. It's an intangible. It may be superficial. It's much harder to put your finger on than a bond.

My idea of family is not dominated by blood ties. Families are fragile things, and I think it is social pressure and emotional attachments that keep them together.

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.

I know how inter-dependent the world is.

Anyway, you can't leave her like that. You can't do that to the woman. She doesn't deserve it; nobody does. You don't belong to her and she doesn't belong to you, but you're both part of each other; if she got up and left now and walked away and you never saw each other again for the rest of your lives, and you lived an ordinary waking life for another fifty years, even so on your deathbed you would still know she was part of you.

It's easy for us to feel separate from other people and from other forms of life, especially if we don't have a reliable connection to our own inner world. Without insight into our internal cycles of pleasure and pain, desires and fears, there is a strong sense of being removed, apart or disconnected. When we do have an understanding of our inner lives, it provides an intuitive opening, even without words, to the ties that exist between ourselves and others.

I watched him, filled with tenderness and ache, wondering what it was that connected us. Was it the wounded places down inside people that sought each other out, that bred a kind of love between them?

The world is truly round and seems to start and end with those we love.

There are three relations [between thee and other things]: the one to the body which surrounds thee; the second to the divine cause from which all things come to all; and the third to those who live with thee.

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

The perception of the comic is a tie of sympathy with other men, a pledge of sanity, and a protection from those perverse tendencies and gloomy insanities in which fine intellects sometimes lose themselves. A rogue alive to the ludicrous is still convertible. If that sense is lost, his fellow-men can do little for him.

Connecting to something keeps our empathy alive.

There is a compulsion that is perhaps the heart of life's meanings, this marvelous mystery of blood ties that brings joy whenever a new family member comes on the scene.

No man is an island.