The basis of love is everyone’s consciousness of the unity of the spiritual source that dwells in all human beings.
Everything that unites people is good and beautiful; everything that divides them is evil and ugly. Everyone knows this truth. It is inscribed in our hearts.
What terrible suffering it is to know that what is causing me pain and taking my life away is not an avalanche or a bacteria, but people, my brothers, who should love me, but who seem to hate me, for they are making me suffer! A suicidal person likely feels something akin to this.
There is no sort of wrong deed of which a man can bear the punishment alone; you can’t isolate yourself and say that the evil that is in you shall not spread. Our deeds are like children that are born to us; they live and act apart from our own will.
— George Eliot
I am so convinced that a human being does everything out of self-interest (properly understood), that I believe that it is as necessary for the life of the world as the sense of touch is for the conservation of the body. Our “Prime Mover” has so wisely managed to tie the interests of one part with the interests of others that we cannot do good to ourselves except by doing good to our neighbors.
— Lichtenberg
No one can attain truth on their own; it is only with everyone’s participation, stone by stone, over millions of generations, from our forefather Adam down to our time, that a temple worthy enough to become a dwelling place for the Almighty God is being constructed.
The life of man is a self-evolving circle, which, from a ring imperceptibly small, rushes on all sides outwards to new and larger circles, and that without end.
— Emerson
Every genuine act of goodwill, every wholly and truly selfless helpful deed, which therefore only has someone else’s need in mind, turns out, strictly speaking, if we examine the case to its very foundations, to be a deed that is mysterious and unexplainable, because it flows from a mysterious consciousness of universal unity and defies any other explanation. Indeed, to even give alms, without having in mind the remotest notion of anything other than easing someone’s crushing need, is only possible because the one who gives knows that that which appears to him in the guise of the pitiful beggar is his self, because in this foreign phenomenon he recognizes his own being in itself.
— Schopenhauer
We are externally separated and internally united with all living beings.
Some vibrations of the spiritual world we can feel, others have not yet reached us, but they are coming, moving like the vibrations of starlight, which our eyes do not yet see.
