Quotes about Interdependence

Nobody has ever before asked the nuclear family to live all by itself in a box the way we do. With no relatives, no support, we've put it in an impossible situation.

We are all tied together in a garment of mutual destiny.

Relationships based on obligation lack dignity.

We both have our independence and freedom, but we have those things with each other. It's a paradox, but it works. It all reminded me of what my friend Henry Cloud told me, that when two people are entirely and completely separate they are finally compatible to be one. Nobody's self-worth lives inside of another person. Intimacy means we are independently together.

When a person has no other persons he invents them because he was not designed to be alone, because it isn't good for a person to be alone.

I think it is interesting that God designed people to need other people. We see those cigarette advertisements with the rugged cowboy riding around alone on a horse, and we think that is strength, when really, it is like setting your soul down on a couch and not exercising it. The soul needs to interact with other people to be healthy.

God's image…is found not best in individual humans, but in humans as they relate to each other.

prudent man or woman understands that all of life is connected. He is aware of the cause-and-effect relationship between what he chooses today and what he experiences tomorrow . .

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were: any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee.

You see, whenever we live in relationship, whenever we simply live in proximity to other people, sooner or later we will run up against their issues—the unhealed or unholy parts of their personalities. Just as they will run into ours. Living in community is like a pack of porcupines sharing the same den. We will get stuck.

One shining quality lends a lustre to another, or hides some glaring defect.

Regarding the debate about faith and works: It's like asking which blade in a pair of scissors is most important.