Community Quotes

“Teamwork is the secret that make common people achieve uncommon result.”
― Ifeanyi Enoch Onuoha

“We may be little, insignificant servants in the eyes of a world motivated by efficiency, control and success. But when we realize that God has chosen us from all eternity, sent us into the world as the blessed ones, handed us over to suffering, can't we, then, also trust that our little lives will multiply themselves and be able to fulfill the needs of countless people?”
― Henri J.M. Nouwen, Life of the Beloved: Spiritual Living in a Secular World

“No time is better spent than that spent in the service of your fellow man.”
― Bryan McGill

“إن الصناعة لها معنى واسع..
إنها تعني الحرية..لأن الآلة تحرر الإنسان.. وتوفر له ثمن ما يمتلك.. الطاقة والوقت والعمر.. وتحرر الشعوب بما تمنحها من قوة.

والنظرية القائلة بأن الصناعة تؤدي إلى مجتمع آلي وإنسان آلي كاذبة من أساسها.. لأن الصناعة في الحق تأخذ على عاتقها الواجبات الآلية وتترك للإنسان مجالاته الإبداعية.”
― مصطفى محمود, حكايات مسافر

“God's people are not to accumulate stuff for tomorrow but to share indiscriminately with the scandalous and holy confidence that God will provide for tomorrow. Then we need not stockpile stuff in barns or a 401(k), especially when there is someone in need.”
― Shane Claiborne, Red Letter Revolution: What If Jesus Really Meant What He Said?

“Living a long life, the conventional wisdom at the time said, depended to a great extent on who we were—that is, our genes. It depended on the decisions we made—on what we chose to eat, and how much we chose to exercise, and how effectively we were treated by the medical system. No one was used to thinking about health in terms of community.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers: The Story of Success

“Grammar, he saw, was agreement, community, consensus.”
― D.T. Max, Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace

“She was drowning—in friendliness, in community—and she was starting to think she didn't want to get pulled out.”
― Tricia Goyer, Love Finds You in Glacier Bay, Alaska

“Our community with one another consists solely in what Christ has done to each of us.”
― Deitrich Bonhoeffer

“Moderate giftedness has been made worthless by the printing press and radio and television and satellites and all that. A moderately gifted person who would have been a community treasure a thousand years ago has to give up, has to go into some other line of work, since modern communications put him or her into daily competition with nothing but the world's champions.”
― Kurt Vonnegut

“I feel that all knowledge should be in the free-trade zone. Your knowledge, my knowledge, everybody's knowledge should be made use of. I think people who refuse to use other people's knowledge are making a big mistake. Those who refuse to share their knowledge with other people are making a great mistake, because we need it all. I don't have any problem about ideas I got from other people. If I find them useful, I'll just ease them right in and make them my own.”
― Myles Horton, We Make the Road by Walking: Conversations on Education and Social Change

“Every story is an act of trust between a writer and a reader: each story, in the end, is social. Whatever a writer sets down can help or harm a community of which he or she is a part. When I write I can imagine a child in California wishing to give away what he’s just seen- a wild animal fleeing though creosote cover in the desert, casting a bright-eyed backward glance or three lines of overheard conversation that seem to contain everything we need understand to repair the gaping rift between body and soul. I look back at that boy turning in glee beneath his pigeons and know it can take a lifetime to convey what you mean, to find the opening. You watch, you set it down. Then you try again.”
― Barry Lopez, About This Life: Journeys on the Threshold of Memory

“In practice it undermines the transformation of faith. When Christians concentrate their time and energy on their own separate spheres and their own institutions-whether all-absorbing megachurches, Christian yellow-page businesses, or womb-to-tomb Christian cultural ghettoes-they lose the outward thrusting, transforming power that is at the heart of the gospel. Instead of being 'salt' and 'light' -images of a permeating and penetrating action-Christians and Christian institutions become soft and vulnerable to corruption from within.”
― Os Guinness, The Call

“The telling and hearing of stories is a bonding ritual that breaks through illusions of separateness and activates a deep sense of our collective interdependence.”
― Annette Simmons, The Story Factor: Inspiration, Influence, and Persuasion through the Art of Storytelling

“I listened so hard because it felt like, while she was telling me stories, she was massaging my soul, letting me know that I was not alone, that I will never have to be alone, that there are friends and family and churches and coffee shops. I was not going to be cast into space.”
― Donald Miller, Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality

“An enlightened person raises the level of the consciousness of the entire community.”
― Phyllis Theroux, The Journal Keeper: A Memoir

“Howard was almost as fond of this hall as he was of his own shop. The Brownies used it on Tuesdays, and the Women's Institute on Wednesdays. It had hosted jumble sales and Jubilee celebrations, wedding receptions and wakes, and it smelled of all of these things: of stale clothes and coffee urns, and the ghosts of home-baked cakes and meat salads; of dust and human bodies; but primarily of aged wood and stone.”
― J.K. Rowling, The Casual Vacancy

“Since I was a small girl, I have lived inside this cottage, shelted by its roof and walls. I have known of people suffering—I have not been blind to them in the way that privilege allows, the way my own husband and now my daughter are blind. It is a statement of fact and not a judgement to say Charlie and Ella’s minds aren’t oriented in that direction; in a way, it absolves them, whereas the unlucky have knocked on the door of my consciousness, they have emerged from the forest and knocked many times over the course of my life, and I have only occasionally allowed them entry. I’ve done more than nothing and much less than I could have. I have laid inside, beneath a quilt on a comfortable couch, in a kind of reverie, and when I heard the unlucky outside my cottage, sometimes I passed them coins or scraps of food, and sometimes I ignored them altogether; if I ignored them, they had no choice but to walk back into the woods, and when they grew weak or got lost or were circled by wolves, I pretended I couldn’t hear them calling my name.”
― Curtis Sittenfeld, American Wife

“To turn the tide of materialism in the Christian community, we desperately need bold models of kingdom-centered living. Despite our need to do it in a way that doesn't glorify people, we must hear each other's stories about giving or else our people will not learn to give.”
― Randy Alcorn, Money, Possessions, and Eternity: A Comprehensive Guide to What the Bible Says about Financial Stewardship, Generosity, Materialism, Retirement, Financial Planning, Gambling, Debt, and More

“Authentic architecture is not the incarnation of the spirit of the age but of the spirit, full stop.”
― Leon Krier, The Architecture of Community

“Viewed from a certain distance and under good light, even an ugly city can look like the promised land.”
― Leon Krier, The Architecture of Community

“The relationship between any two communities in the global economy is not unlike a marriage. As couples counselors advise, relationships falter when two partners are too interdependent. When any stress affecting one partner - the loss of a job, an illness, a bad-hair day - brings down the other, the couple suffers. A much healthier relationship is grounded in the relative strength of each partner, who each should have his or her own interests, hobbies, friends, and professional identity, so that when anything goes wrong, the couple can support one another from a position of strength. Our ability to love, like our ability to produce, must be grounded in our own security. And our economy, like our love, when it comes from a place of community, can grow without limit.”
― Michael H. Shuman, The Small-Mart Revolution: How Local Businesses Are Beating the Global Competition

“When I walked into the Christian section of a bookstore, the message was clear: Faith is something you do alone. Rick does not have much tolerance for people living alone. He’s like Bill Clinton in that he feels everyone’s pain. If Rick thinks somebody is lonely, he can’t sleep at night. He wants us all to live with each other and play nice so he can get some rest. Tortured soul.”
― Donald Miller, Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality

“As an introverted person, I struggle even writing about community because I know how difficult it often is for me to walk across the room to converse with people. People often drain the energy out of me, and too often I prefer to protect myself rather than engage in relationships with people. For some of us who are more extroverted, community is a way of life, yet I wonder how intentional even the most extroverted person is about making community a holiness-shaping thing. Community with God’s people ultimately shapes us to reflect more of who God is.”
― Tyler Braun, Why Holiness Matters: We've Lost our Way--But We Can Find it Again

“The goal of using our voice is not just to be noticed, but with humility to gracefully be fully present in relationships. Deferring to another person does not require that we be ignored; allowing that is cowardice. Hiding, a form of dishonesty, prevents true community.”
― Rosalie De Rosset, Unseduced and Unshaken: The Place of Dignity in a Woman's Choices

“If you’re an Orthodox believer, then what sustains this framework is the obligation that you follow. But if you live in a democratic, liberal world whose motto is: “Make choices and manage your choices according to what is good for you,” then there is a built-in tension between that which connects and that which divides. Between the material and the intellectual or ethical. Materialism is not a dirty word, but in this tension between the individual and the material on the one hand, and the communal and the ethical on the other, we are at the end of an age in which the material and the individual are triumphing.”
― Kalid Gilad

“I ponder the rhythms of letting go and embracing whatever is around the corner, trusting that the empty spaces will be filled. And knowing that sometimes community can happen only in the gaps where mystery resides.”
― Joyce Hollyday

“Cities and landscapes are illustrations of our spiritual and material worth. They not only express our values but give them a tangible reality. They determine the way in which we use or squander our energy, time, and land resources.”
― Leon Krier

“The rigidity of a bottle's form does not affect the fluidity of the liquid it contains.”
― Léon Krier, The Architecture of Community

“Superabundant piety/righteousness (and its practices) is that form of life that enhances the individual and the community simultaneously.”
― Michael Joseph Brown