Sufjan Stevens Quotes

We often surround ourselves with the people we most want to live with, thus forming a club or clique, not a community. Anyone can form a club; it takes grace, shared vision, and hard work to form a community.

You can't walk alone. Many have given the illusion, but none have really walked alone. Man is not made that way. Each man is bedded in his people, their history, their culture, and their values.

I know enough to know that no man is an island.

The Russian people get so insanely close to each other as friends. Their lives are interrelated so much on an everyday basis.

Most of my books have been about the complex ways an individual depends on community.

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

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

When I do something, I consult my family, so that when you get me, you get my whole family.

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.

The thing we need most is each other.

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.

We can be human only together. A person is a person to other persons. We so desperately long for all of us to learn that we are meant for one another. We are meant for complementarity.

In Afghanistan, you don't understand yourself solely as an individual. You understand yourself as a son, a brother, a cousin to somebody, an uncle to somebody. You are part of something bigger than yourself.

There's something about being with a group of people who become like family that must be needed in society.

No one person is an island.

And suddenly, like light in darkness, the real truth broke in upon me; the simple fact of Man, which I had forgotten, which had lain deep buried and out of sight; the idea of community, of unity.

Far too many people, especially within evangelicalism, think that the individual is all that matters, and that the corporate dimension is a distraction or diversion. Of course Christianity is deeply personal for every single Christian; nobody gets lost in the kingdom of God. But you can't play that off against the corporate dimension.

Humans bond to families but not necessarily to neighbors.

'The Room' is relationships. The room is you and me and everyone in America. That's basically what 'The Room' is.

Group think and groups in general allow you to more fully give yourself to something other than yourself and your betterment - to feel a sense of belonging. Now is this a good thing? I don't know, but it's something that is longed for, at least by me.

God designed humans to live in community.

Forming communities - even and especially ones based on strong loyalties and allegiances - is in our DNA. It's what's kept us alive for millions of years.

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.

We need others for our physical, emotional, and spiritual well-being. Without others we are nothing. Our sense that we are an island, an independent, self-sufficient individual, bears no relation to reality. It is closer to the truth to picture ourself as a cell in the vast body of life, distinct yet intimately bound up with all living beings. We cannot exist without others, and they in turn are affected by everything we do. The idea that it is possible to secure our own welfare while neglecting the welfare of others, or even at the expense of others, is completely unrealistic.

There is a Jewish notion that holiness is found with other people. To understand what life really is, one has to share it.