Whether they know it or not, all beings are inextricably linked to one another.
Son of man, have you not deceived your brothers? No, no, for you have told them: “Come to me, and I will give you rest.” But they did not come to you, they did not accept your teaching with their hearts and deeds, they did not submit to your decrees, they did not start loving each other, as children of one Father. If they really were to come to you, then they would love each other and would all be united, and if they were all united, what force could prevent them from affirming their right to establish the kingdom of heaven? But now they are powerless, because divided each of them is weak and stands alone against their misguided oppressors. They are powerless because they have neither faith, which conquers everything, nor love, which is more powerful than faith itself. They are powerless because they have become frozen in their selfishness, because they lack that by virtue of which people sacrifice themselves, by virtue of which people battle not one day, but every day, without ever growing tired, without ever losing hope. They are powerless because they are afraid of people, because they do not understand that which you have told them, namely, that the one who wants to save his life will lose it, but the one who loses it to establish the kingdom of your law will save it.
— Lamennais
The one who thinks that the only thing that truly exists is his person and that other beings are phantoms, whose partial existence he recognizes only when they can assist or obstruct his aims, such a person, feeling himself separated from all other beings by an immeasurably deep abyss and recognizing his existence only in his person, cannot fail to see that his death will mean not only the death of that sole thing that existed, i.e. his self, but the death of the whole world along with it.
On the other hand, the one who sees his own being in everyone else and in all living things, who merges with all living things through his life, such a person loses only a small part of his existence upon death—such a person continues to exist in everyone else, in those in whom he has always recognized and loved his being and himself; for such a person, the deception that divided his consciousness from that of everyone else disappears.
This is the main if not an exclusive difference in how particularly good and particularly bad people greet the hour of their death.
— After Schopenhauer
I will never search for and will never accept a separate, personal salvation. I do not want to attain peace alone; I will always and everywhere live and work for the pursuit of the universal salvation of every being in every world. Until everyone is freed I will not leave the world of sin, sorrow and struggle.
— Chinese wisdom (Guanyin)
Rational beings, called to work together on a single task, function like the limbs of a human body in the common life of the world. They have been created for rational unity of action. There is something uplifting and comforting in the knowledge that you are a member of a great spiritual brotherhood.
— Marcus Aurelius
Humankind is beginning to realize that everyone must either rise or fall together. People are beginning to pay more and more attention to the voice that is constantly speaking within us.
— Lucy Mallory
Do not think that the good can be limited to an individual being or that the evil of an individual being is not the evil of the whole world and does not affect you.
