QuoteProject
Confirming an intuitive sense I've always felt for the interconnectedness of all things, this doctrine has provided me ways to understand the intricate web of co-arising that links one being with all other beings, and to apprehend the reciprocities between thought and action, self and universe.
Joanna Macy
ShareWTF𝕏

Interpretation

What this quote means

The quote reflects the idea that everything in existence is interconnected and emphasizes the relationship between thoughts, actions, and the universe.

Joanna Macy's quote captures the essence of interconnectedness, suggesting that all beings and elements in the universe are intricately linked. It highlights the profound relationships between our individual actions and thoughts, and how they resonate with the larger cosmos, encouraging a holistic perspective toward life and existence.

Themes

InterconnectednessThoughtActionUniverseReciprocity

In practice

Example use cases

In a lecture on environmental responsibility, one might quote this to emphasize the impact of individual actions on the planet.

More from Joanna Macy

If the world is to be healed through human efforts, I am convinced it will be by ordinary people, people whose love for this life is even greater than their fear. People who can open to the web of life that called us into being
Joanna MacyRead
To be alive in this beautiful, self-organizing universe -- to participate in the dance of life with senses to perceive it, lungs that breathe it, organs that draw nourishment from it -- is a wonder beyond words.
Joanna MacyRead
It is good to realize that falling apart is not such a bad thing. Indeed, it is as essential to evolutionary and psychological transformation as the cracking of outgrown shells.
Joanna MacyRead
Out of this darkness a new world can arise, not to be constructed by our minds so much as to emerge from our dreams. Even though we cannot see clearly how it's going to turn out, we are still called to let the future into our imagination. We will never be able to build what we have not first cherished in our hearts.
Joanna MacyRead
It’s walking the razor’s edge of the sacred moment where you don’t know, you can’t count on, and comfort yourself with any sure hope. All you can know is your allegiance to life and your intention to serve it in this moment that we are given. In that sense, this radical uncertainty liberates your creativity and courage.
Joanna MacyRead
We are our world knowing itself. We can relinquish our separateness. We can come home again - and participate in our world in a richer, more responsible and poignantly beautiful way than before, in our infancy.
Joanna MacyRead

Similar quotes

The first woman was created from the rib of a man. She was not made from his head to top him, nor from his feet to be trampled on by him, but out of his side to be equal to him.
Sophia LorenRead
Every one of the world's "great" religions utterly trivializes the immensity and beauty of the cosmos. Books like the Bible and the Koran get almost every significant fact about us and our world wrong. Every scientific domain -- from cosmology to psychology to economics -- has superseded and surpassed the wisdom of Scripture. Everything of value that people get from religion can be had more honestly, without presuming anything on insufficient evidence. The rest is self-deception, set to music.
Sam HarrisRead
When a truth is not given complete freedom, freedom is not complete.
Vaclav HavelRead
The man who sat on the ground in his tipi meditating on life and its meaning, accepting the kinship of all creatures and acknowledging unity with the universe of things, was infusing into his being the true essence of civilization.
Luther Standing BearRead
Murder will out, this my conclusion.
Geoffrey ChaucerRead
The best and safest way of philosophising seems to be, first to enquire diligently into the properties of things, and to establish those properties by experiences [experiments] and then to proceed slowly to hypotheses for the explanation of them. For hypotheses should be employed only in explaining the properties of things, but not assumed in determining them; unless so far as they may furnish experiments.
Isaac NewtonRead

A little wisdom, now and then

Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.