Quotes for the Journey: Oneness We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow humans. Herman Melville

When we live moment to moment, we place ourselves at the center of life, where infinite wisdom abides, rather than on the periphery, where things are forever changing and we are susceptible to the vagaries of the world.  It is in our awareness each moment of our oneness with God that our inner peace and greatest strength lie.       -Susan L. Taylor     When we are afraid of someone or something, it is because we do not feel that particular person or thing is a part of us.  When we have established conscious oneness with the Absolute, with the Infinite Vast, then everything there is part of us.  And how can we be afraid of ourselves?       -Sri Chinmoy     You can kiss your family and friends good-bye and put miles between you, but at the same time you carry them with you in your heart, your mind, your stomach, because you do not just live in a world but a world lives in you.        -Frederick Buechner     It does not matter what name you attach to it, but your consciousness must ascend to the point through which you view the universe with your God-centered nature.  The feeling accompanying this experience is that of complete oneness with the Universal Whole.  One merges into a euphoria of absolute unity with all life.        -Peace Pilgrim     It’s only in our minds that we are separate from the rest of the world.       -Gay Luce      Ye are all leaves of one tree and the fruits of one branch.       -Bahá'u'lláh

All things are linked with one another, and this oneness is sacred; there is nothing that is not interconnected with everything else.  For things are interdependent, and they combine to form this universal order.  There is only one universe made up of all things, and one creator who pervades them; there is one substance and one law, namely, common reason in all thinking creatures, and all truth is one--if, as we believe, there is only one path of perfection for all beings who share the same mind.       -Marcus Aurelius

A miracle is nothing more or less than this:  Anyone who has come into a knowledge of his or her true identity, of his or her oneness with the all-pervading wisdom and power, this makes it possible for laws higher than the ordinary mind knows of to be revealed to him or her.      -Ralph Waldo Trine

Humanity must never lose hope.  Our present conflicts and differences are difficult but not hopeless.  We cannot expect people of such different races, cultures, languages, ways of life and beliefs, who have lived for thousands of years separated from each other to suddenly love each other and work together harmoniously.  It takes time and patience.  We must work on it stubbornly and not throw in the towel.        -Robert Muller

We share with all life the capacity for feeling, the experience of having a body, mind, and heart in continual interface with countless other bodies, minds, and hearts.  Our capacity to feel deeply means we share with all life the possibility of experiencing delight, joy, trust, and intimacy, just as we share in the capacity to experience pain, sorrow, grief, and fear.  Living within a physical body, we all share the experience of aging, frailty, illness, and death, just as we share the precious times of strength, health, safety, and vitality.  Through our minds we share the capacity to experience confusion, agitation, and complexity, just as we share the possibilities of serenity, clarity, and balance.  An understanding of this profound interconnectedness of all life is at the root of the compassionate heart dedicated to alleviating suffering without reservation or exception.        -Christina Feldman

If we could but recognize our common humanity, that we do belong together, that our destinies are bound up in one another's, that we can be free only together, that we can be human only together, then a glorious world would come into being where all of us lived harmoniously together as members of one family, the human family.       -Desmond Tutu

It is our desire that we and you should be as one heart, one mind, and one body, thus becoming one people, entertaining a mutual love and regard for each other, to be preserved firm and entire, not only between you and us, but between your children and our children, to all succeeding generations.        -Kanickhungo

We’ve been invited to participate in this life, to be present, one to another, and that’s all that’s expected of us.  Our successes may bring us personal joy, but our value as persons lies only in our being.  But living fully is more than just making an appearance, here, today.  It’s celebrating our oneness—our ties to one another—our need for one another’s presence to complete our own.  And we can be celebrants only when we’re involved and fully focused on the experience.  We capture life’s gifts, its riches, when we are intent on the moment’s fullness.  We miss what we most need when our hearts and minds are distracted.       - unattributed

There exists a powerful energizing force in the spiritual life principle.  All energy began with the Creator, who infused it not only in all natural processes, but also into that higher form of nature called human nature.  The more closely, then, that a person identifies with the Creator, the more surely that person will experience within his or her own nature the process of re-creation which operates in all creation.        -Norman Vincent Peale

Gestures of kindness, courage, honesty, and love tend to be small and quiet, and most of them are made by ordinary human beings.  But these acts create and sustain a dense web of commitment that holds this planet and its people together.  The web is so resilient that it will never be completely destroyed, because it is constructed of human goodwill rather than bricks, money, or nationalism.       -Sallirae Henderson

This overcoming of all the usual barriers between the individual and the Absolute is the great mystic achievement.  In mystic states we both become one with the Absolute and we become aware of our oneness.  This is the everlasting and triumphant mystical tradition, hardly altered by differences of clime or creed.       -William James

All know that the drop merges into the ocean, but few know that the ocean merges into the drop.      -Kabir

I believe in the absolute oneness of God and therefore also of humanity.  What though we have many bodies?  We have but one soul.        -Mohandas Gandhi

The greatest thing ever known— indeed, the greatest thing that ever can be known—is that in our real essential nature we are one with the Infinite Life and Power, and that by coming into, and dwelling continually in, the conscious, living realisation of this great fact, we enable to be manifested unto and actualised within us the qualities and powers of the Divine Life, and this in the exact degree of the completeness of this realisation on our part.  The one great Truth of Being, therefore, is that there is no real Life except God (Good), and that the poor excuses for lives lived by so many today is simply the result of ignorance of this fact.       -Ralph Waldo Trine

An excellent way to practice love is to set your intention on seeing beyond someone’s behavior or personality.  Try to realize that beneath the surface insecurity, negative thinking, and poor behavior, everyone is connected to God.  Just as you wouldn’t get angry at someone simply because he or she is in a wheelchair, you need not be angry because a person hasn’t yet opened his or her heart to the nourishment of his or her Soul.  When people act in unloving ways, it only means that they are out of touch with their Souls and aren’t feeling spiritually nourished.       -Richard Carlson

When I speak about attention, I mean literally, "How much attention can we pay to ourselves?"  As children, sometimes we cannot hold our attention for more than a couple of seconds.  Over the years we are able to attend to more and more.  Yet, we're seldom schooled to hold life in respect, to enlarge our ability to love, take care of, and be respectfully connected with all things around us.        -Brooke Medicine Eagle

The fundamental delusion of humanity is to suppose that I am here and you are out there.        -Yatsutani Roshi

Praying without ceasing is not ritualized, nor are there even words.  It is a constant state of awareness of oneness with God.        -Peace Pilgrim

I came to a clear internal realization that there was nothing I could do as a separated self that would ever fulfill me.       -Barbara Marx Hubbard

Our bread and water are of one table:  the progeny of Adam are as a single soul.       -Muhammad Iqbal

All are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.  Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.  I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be.        -Martin Luther King, Jr.

Even as the scent dwells within the flower, so God resides always within your heart.       -Traditional Sikh Wisdom

The news of the day may steer me toward seeing the world as unfriendly and chaotic, but the divisions I see reflected in the news are misleading.  There are no true divisions between me and my fellow human beings.  We are united by the spirit of the Divine which is within each of us.        -unattributed

Whatever books you may read, you cannot realize the Divine merely by intellectual effort.  One must put it into practice.  That sense of oneness can only be promoted by the practice of love and not by any other means.       -Sri Sathya Sai Baba

You are a second world in miniature; the sun and moon are within you, and also the stars.       -Origen

If you wish to know the Divine, feel the wind on your face and the warm sun on your hand.        -Buddha

I celebrate myself, and what I assume you shall assume, For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you. I loafe and invite my soul, I lean and loafe at my ease. . . observing a spear of summer grass.        -Walt Whitman

Because all existence is founded upon the ever-present state of union, everything already exists in a state of tranquility.  However, this state of tranquility is masked from us by our assumption that there is a separation, that there is a problem.        -Suzuki Roshi

To discover joy is to return to a state of oneness with the universe.        -Peggy Jenkins

the only thing which has to heal is the illusion of being separate       -wilfried fink

And so it is true in this sense that there is essentially but one religion, the religion of the living God. For to live in the conscious realisation of the fact that God lives in us, is indeed the life of our life, and that in ourselves we have no independent life, and hence no power, is the one great fact of all true religion, even as it is the one great fact of human life. Religion, therefore, at its purest, and life at its truest, are essentially and necessarily one and the same.       -Ralph Waldo Trine

How could the drops of water know themselves as a river?  Yet the river flows on.       -Antoine de Saint Exupery

I was sitting alone on the downtown IRT on my way to pick up the children at their after-school music classes.  The train had just pulled out of the Twenty-third Street station and was accelerating to its cruising speed.  All around me people sat bundled up in mufflers, damp woolen coats, and slush-stained boots, reading newspapers or staring off blankly as the train jerked along the track.  The air was cold and close, with the smell of stale tobacco clinging to winter coats.  An elderly pair exchanged words in a Slavic tongue; a mother read an advertising sign to her three bedraggled, open-mouthed children. Then suddenly the dull light in the car began to shine with exceptional lucidity until everything around me was glowing with an indescribable aura, and I saw in the row of motley passengers opposite the miraculous connection of all living beings.  Not felt; saw.  What began as a desultory thought grew to a vision, large and unifying, in which all the people in the car hurtling downtown together, including myself, like all the people on the planet hurtling together around the sun--our entire living cohort--formed one united family, indissolubly connected by the rare and mysterious accident of life.  No matter what our countless superficial differences, we were equal, we were one, by virtue of simply being alive at this moment out of all the possible moments stretching endlessly back and ahead.  The vision filled me with overwhelming love for the entire human race and a feeling that no matter how incomplete or damaged our lives, we were surpassingly lucky to be alive.  Then the train pulled into the station and I got off. Aliz Kates Shulman

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