“Partnership—the tendency to associate, establish links, live inside one another, and cooperate—is one of the hallmarks of life.”

Confessions Of A Sceptic
The Nemesis of Faith (1849)
Context: Life complete, is lived in two worlds; the one inside, and the one outside. The first half of our days is spent wholly in the former; the second, if it is what it ought to be, wholly in the latter — till our education is almost finished; theories are only words to us, and church controversy is not of things but of shadows of things. Through all that time life and thought beyond our own experience is but a great game played out by book actors; we do not think, we only think we think, and we have been too busy in our own line to have a notion really of what is beyond it. But while so much of our talk is so unreal, our own selves, our own risings, fallings, aspirings, resolutions, misgivings, these are real enough to us; these are our hidden life, our sanctuary of our own mysteries.

From a letter to Mary A. Hulbert (21 September 1913)
1910s

Source: Annihilation

Source: One Day

As Lessing says, 'Let the devil catch you but by a single hair, and you are his forever.'
Source: A Dictionary of Thoughts, 1891, p. 152.

Epilogue: Ecological Literacy
The Web of Life (1996)

Source: Life and Death in One Breath

Human Nature and Social Theory (1969)
Context: One will be conducive to cooperation and solidarity another social structure to competition, suspiciousness, avarice; another to child-like receptiveness, another to destructive aggressiveness. All empirical forms or human needs and drives have to be understood as results of the social practice (in the last analysis based on the productive forces, class structure, etc., etc.) but they all have to fulfill the functions which are inherent in man’s nature in general, and that is to permit him to relate himself to others and share a common frame of reference, etc. The existential contradiction within man (to which I would now add also the contradiction between limitations which reality imposes on his life, and the virtually limitless imagination which his brain permits him to follow) is what I believe to be one of the motives of psychological and social dynamics. Man can never stand still. He must find solutions to this contradiction, and ever better solutions to the extent to which reality enables him.
The question then arises whether there is an optimal solution which can be inferred from man’s nature, and which constitutes a potential tendency in man. I believe that such optimal solutions can be inferred from the nature of man, and I have recently found it quite useful to think in terms of what in sociology and economy is now often called »system analysis«. One might start with the idea, in the first place, that human personality — just like society — is a system, that is to say, that each part depends on every other, and no part can be changed unless all or most other parts are also changed. A system is better than chaos. If a society system disintegrates or is destroyed by blows from the outside the society ends in chaos, and a completely new society is built upon its ruins, often using the elements of the destroyed system to build the new. That has happened many times in history. But, what also happens is that the society is not simply destroyed but that the system is changed, and a new system emerges which can be considered to be a transformation of the old one.