In the few years since I’ve started to travel this world, I’ve found myself changing. The cramped cynical worldview of a man who’d only seen life through the narrow prism of the restaurant kitchen had altered. I’d been so many places, I’d met so many people from wildly divergent backgrounds, countries, and cultures.
Everywhere I’d been, I’d been, as in Beruit, treated so well. I’d been the recipient of so many random acts of kindness from strangers and I’d begun to think that no matter where I went or who I sat down with, that food and a few drinks seemed always to bring people together. That this planet was filled with basically good and decent people doing the best they could, if frequently under difficult circumstances. That the human animal was perhaps a better and nicer species than I had once thought.
I’d begun to believe that the dinner table was the great leveler, where people from opposite sides of the world could always sit down and talk and eat and drink and if not solve all the worlds problems, at least find, for a time, common ground.
Now, I’m not so sure. Maybe the world’s not like that at all. Maybe in the real world—the one without cameras and happy food and travel shows—everybody, the good and the bad together, are all crushed under some terrible wheel.
I hope, I really hope, that I’m wrong about that.
—Anthony Bourdain
Years ago I recognized my kinship with all living things, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on the Earth. I said then and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it; while there is a criminal element, I am of it; while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.
—Eugene Debs
There is one mind common to all individual men. Every man is an inlet to the same and to all of the same. He that is once admitted to the right of reason is made a freeman of the whole estate. What Plato has thought, he may think; what a saint has felt, he may feel; what at any time has befallen any man, he can understand. Who hath access to this universal mind is a party to all that is or can be done, for this is the only and sovereign agent.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
No man really knows about other human beings. The best he can do is to suppose that they are like himself.
—John Steinbeck in The Winter of Our Discontent
We are lonesome animals. We spend all our life trying to be less lonesome. One of our ancient methods is to tell a story begging the listener to say—and to feel—'Yes, that’s the way it is, or at least that’s the way I feel it. You’re not as alone as you thought.'
—John Steinbeck
Men differ by what they show, and have in common what they hide.
—Paul Valéry
Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another, 'What! You too? I thought I was the only one
—C. S. Lewis
Even fighting in self-defense is wrong, though it is higher than fighting in aggression. There is no “righteous” indignation, because indignation comes from not recognizing sameness in all things.
—Vivekananda
If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other.
—Mother Teresa
I know what the cure is: it is to give up, to relinquish, to surrender, so that our little hearts may beat in unison with the great heart of the world.
—Henry Miller
The fundamental delusion of humanity is to suppose that I am here and you are out there.
—Yasutani Roshi
Wherever you go, the sky is the same color.
—Persian saying
Her clothes have no buttons. There are two missing from my jacket. This lady and I are almost of the same religion.
—Guillaume Apollinaire
Beliefs are what divide people. Doubt unites them.
—Peter Ustinov
There is the sky, which is all men's together.
—Euripides