“We live together, we act on, and react to, one another; but always and in all circumstances we are by ourselves. The martyrs go hand in hand into the arena; they are crucified alone. Embraced, the lovers desperately try to fuse their insulated ecstacies into a single self-transcendence; in vain. By its very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude.”

— Aldous Huxley, book The Doors of Perception

Page 159
The Doors of Perception (1954)

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Aldous Huxley290

English writer 1894–1963

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“We live together, we act on, and react to, one another; but always and in all circumstances we are by ourselves. The martyrs go hand in hand into the arena; they are crucified alone. Embraced, the lovers desperately try to fuse their insulated ecstasies into a single self-transcendence; in vain. By its very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude. Sensations, feelings, insights, fancies — all these are private and, except through symbols and at second hand, incommunicable. We can pool information about experiences, but never the experiences themselves. From family to nation, every human group is a society of island universes.”

Aldous Huxley book The Doors of Perception

The Doors of Perception (1954)

“2330. Live not to thyself alone; but have it in Mind, that we are all Members of one Body: and it is as natural to help one another, as for the Hands to help the Feet; and the Eyes the Hands.”

Thomas Fuller (writer) (1654–1734) British physician, preacher, and intellectual

Introductio ad prudentiam: Part II (1727)

“It logically follows that, in today's multicultural world, the truly reliable path to coexistence, to peaceful coexistence and creative cooperation, must start from what is at the root of all cultures and what lies infinitely deeper in human hearts and minds than political opinion, convictions, antipathies, or sympathies — it must be rooted in self-transcendence:
Transcendence as a hand reached out to those close to us, to foreigners, to the human community, to all living creatures, to nature, to the universe.
Transcendence as a deeply and joyously experienced need to be in harmony even with what we ourselves are not, what we do not understand, what seems distant from us in time and space, but with which we are nevertheless mysteriously linked because, together with us, all this constitutes a single world.
Transcendence as the only real alternative to extinction.”

Václav Havel (1936–2011) playwright, essayist, poet, dissident and 1st President of the Czech Republic

The Need for Transcendence in the Postmodern World (1994)

“And long we try in vain to speak and act
Our hidden self, and what we say and do
Is eloquent, is well — but ’tis not true!”

Matthew Arnold (1822–1888) English poet and cultural critic who worked as an inspector of schools

"The Buried Life" (1852), st. 6

“We came into the world like brother and brother,
And now let's go hand in hand, not one before another.”

William Shakespeare The Comedy of Errors

Source: The Comedy of Errors

“If the world acts together, we can make sure that all of our children enjoy lives of opportunity and dignity.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

2014, Address to the United Nations (September 2014)

“The war against the self is the internalization of the war against nature.
We have been taught that we need an act of will to overcome our base natures. But when we try too hard to be good, we only separate ourselves from others.”

Charles Eisenstein (1967) American writer

Charles Eisenstein, Oral presentation in Baltimore, MD March 2012

“On one hand we go like hell for every terror cell we can find, we penetrate it, we destroy it. On the other hand, there is a much bigger need for a political solution.”

John le Carré (1931) British novelist and spy

Radio interview (November 2008)

“We cannot embrace His cross, and yet refuse our own. We cannot raise the cup of His remembrance to our lips, without a secret pledge to Him, to one another, to the great company of the faithful in every age that we, too, hold ourselves at God's disposal, that we will ask nothing on our own account, that we will pass simply into the Divine hand to take us whither it will.”

James Martineau (1805–1900) English religious philosopher

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 373.

“It is our suffering that brings us together. It is not love. Love does not obey the mind, it turns to hate when forced. The bond that binds us is beyond choice. We are brothers. We are brothers in what we share. In pain, which each of us must suffer alone, in hunger, in poverty, in hope, we know our brotherhood. We know it, because we have been forced to learn it. We know that there is no help for us but from one another, that no hand will save us if we do not reach out our hand. And the hand that you reach out is empty, as mine is. You have nothing. You possess nothing. You own nothing. You are free. All you have is what you are, and what you give.”

Ursula K. Le Guin Hainish Cycle

Source: Hainish Cycle, (1974), Chapter 9 (p. 300) — from the protagonist’s major speech.

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