Binds Us Quotes & Sayings

When we say that the persistence of competition is ensured by fate, we mean that individual freedom is so guaranteed. The one thing to which fate binds us is liberty. — John Bates Clark

What shames us, what we most fear to tell, does not set us apart from others; it binds us together if only we can take the risk to speak it. — Starhawk

There had never been any more between us than
chance had brought. But perhaps that makes a greater indebtedness
and binds closer than much else — Erich Maria Remarque

All who think cannot but see there is a sanction like that of religion which binds us in partnership in the serious work of the world. — Benjamin Franklin

We learn the influence of our will from experience alone. And experience only teaches us, how one event constantly follows another; without instructing us in the secret connexion, which binds them together, and renders them inseparable. — David Hume

I steady him, he steadies me, the chain that binds us, the chain that sets us free.
- Ben Parish. — Rick Yancey

For too long, we have focused on our differences - in our politics and backgrounds, in our race and beliefs - rather than cherishing the unity and pride that binds us together. — Bob Riley

I like to believe that we are more alike in our positive experiences than in our negative ones that what binds us is stronger than what separates us.
pg 139 — Marcelo Figueras

Another tradition to politics, a tradition (of politics) that stretched from the days of the country's founding to the glory of the civil rights movement, a tradition based on the simple idea that we have a stake in one another, and that what binds us together is greater than what drives us apart, and that if enough people believe in the truth of that proposition and act on it, then we might not solve every problem, but we can get something meaningful done. — Barack Obama

Toxic shame, the shame that binds us, is experienced as the all-pervasive sense that "I am flawed and defective as a human being." Toxic shame is no longer an emotion that signals our limits; it is a state of being, a core identity. Toxic shame gives you a sense of worthlessness, a sense of failing and falling short as a human being. Toxic shame is a rupture of the self with the self. It is like internal bleeding - exposure to oneself lies at the heart of toxic shame. A shame-based person will guard against exposing his inner self to others, but more significantly, he will guard against exposing himself to himself. Toxic shame is so excruciating because it is the painful exposure of the perceived failure of self to the self. In toxic shame the self becomes an object of its own contempt, an object that can't be trusted. As an object that can't be trusted, one experiences oneself as untrustworthy. — John Bradshaw

I think every child deserves a family as loving and committed as mine. Because the sense of family comes from the commitment we make to each other to work through the hard times so we can enjoy the good ones. It comes from the love that binds us; that's what makes a family. My family is just as real as yours. — Zach Wahls

We breathe too fast to be able to grasp things in themselves or to expose their fragility. Our panting postulates and distorts them, creates and disfigures them, and binds us to them. I bestir myself, therefore I emit a world as suspect as my speculation which justifies it; I espouse movement, which changes me into a generator of being, into an artisan of fictions, while my cosmogonic verve makes me forget that, led on by the whirlwind of acts, I am nothing but an acolyte of time, an agent of decrepit universes. ( ... )
If we would regain our freedom, we must shake off the burden of sensation, no longer react to the world by our senses, break our bonds. For all sensation is a bond, pleasure as much as pain, joy as much as misery. The only free mind is the one that, pure of all intimacy with beings or objects, plies its own vacuity. — Emil Cioran

A mother's love is indeed the golden link that binds youth to age; and he is still but a child, however time may have furrowed his cheek, or silvered his brow, who can yet recall, with a softened heart, the fond devotion, or the gentle chidings, of the best friend that God gives us. — Christian Nestell Bovee

Our human compassion binds us the one to the other - not in pity or patronizingly, but as human beings who have learnt how to turn our common suffering into hope for the future. -Nelson Mandela — Michael Gallegos Borresen

Considering that the blessed life we so long for consists in an intimate and true love of God Our Creator and Lord, which binds and obliges us all to a sincere love. — Ignatius Of Loyola

Karma brings us ever back to rebirth, binds us to the wheel of births and deaths. Good Karma drags us back as relentlessly as bad, and the chain which is wrought out of our virtues holds as firmly and as closely as that forged from our vices. — Annie Besant

Morality binds people into groups. It gives us tribalism, it gives us genocide, war, and politics. But it also gives us heroism, altruism, and sainthood. — Jonathan Haidt

I think things like food, the food of the south is sort of the common tie that binds us all, Black and White, the sense memories. It's a very particular part of the country. — Sela Ward

The Hebrew language ... is the only glue which holds together our scattered bones. It also holds together the rings in the chain of time ... It binds us to those who built pyramids, to those who shed their blood on the ramparts of Jerusalem, and to those who, at the burning stakes, cried Shema Yisrael! — I.L. Peretz

Choice is the mortar that binds together the things that make us who we are. — Fennel Hudson

But if we believe that love is this powerful force that binds us together, and if this belief brings us happiness and stability in this tumultuous world, then what's the harm? — Cynthia Hand

Here is what unsayable about us: Jonathan and I are members of a team so old nobody else could join even if we wanted them to. What binds us is stronger than sex. It is stronger than love. We're related. Each of us is the other born into a different flesh. — Michael Cunningham

Any act often repeated soon forms a habit; and habit allowed, steady gains in strength, At first it may be but as a spider's web, easily broken through, but if not resisted it soon binds us with chains of steel. — Tryon Edwards

When Jesus gives us new life, He strips away all that binds us ... all that holds us captive ... and frees us so we can be fully alive to enter into a new life with Him. Do you live in this freedom, or do you live bound up in grave clothes, held captive by bitterness, unforgiveness, anger, fear, doubt, sickness, or something else? Friend, Jesus wants you to live and walk in the freedom of the cross. — Wendy Blight

When I meet people in different parts of the world, I am always reminded that we are all basically alike. We are all human beings. Maybe we have different clothes, our skin is of a different color or we speak different languages. That is on the surface. But basically, we are the same human beings. That is what binds us to each other. That is what makes it possible for us to understand each other and to develop friendship and closeness. — Dalai Lama XIV

All things exist as they are perceived: at least in relation to the percipient. 'The mind is its own place, and of itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.' But poetry defeats the curse which binds us to be subjected to the accident of surrounding impressions. And whether it spreads its own figured curtain or withdraws life's dark veil from before the scene of things, it equally creates for us a being within our being. — Percy Bysshe Shelley

It is no coincidence that every civilisation in human history has recognised at its foundation an element of sacredness, to which the civil authority is ultimately bound. The sacred is an awareness of moral boundaries that are not circumscribed by us, of an ultimate reason that cannot be found in us. It is the realisation that what binds us together as a society is something that lies beyond ourselves, and that human beings have an inherent value that cannot be arbitrarily limited or denied by political, economic or social power. — Giorgio Roversi

But now I'm wondering if I need it anymore, if we ever really need these words, "Dauntless," "Erudite," "Divergent," "Allegiant," or if we can just be friends or lovers or siblings, defined instead by the choices we make and the love and loyalty that binds us. — Veronica Roth

Consider it this way. The present is a split second, so tiny and trivial as to be immaterial. Everything else, everything real and substantial, is a coral reef of dead split seconds, forming the islands and continents of our reality. Every moment is a brick in the wall of the past, building enormous structures that have identity and meaning, cities we live in. The future is wet shapeless clay, the present is so brief it barely exists, but the past houses and shelters us, gives us a home and a name; and the mortar that binds those bricks, that stops them from sliding apart into a nettle-shrouded ruin, is memory. — K.J. Parker

Beware of the differences that blind us to the unity that binds us. — Huston Smith

Ignorance is the root of everything that stands in the way of these attainments. Ignorance binds us to suffering; therefore ignorance has to be clearly identified. — Dalai Lama XIV

If you keep your heart open, that same pain can become a purifying pain, a strengthening pain. If we choose forgiveness over bitterness, that pain can heal instead of hurt. Instead of a pain that divides, it can be a pain that binds. Instead of a pain that breaks us down, it can be a pain that builds us up. — Seth Adam Smith

Whatever binds us, ripples through us all. We might not all be shadow, but we are all human. I remind myself every night. I am a man. I always will be.
And I will always, fiercely, defend my loves, to the very end.
Let it come. — Carmen Dominique Taxer

Sex and Intimacy Intimacy is the fiber that binds us to the people we love, and is built on time, investment, and honest communication. In a healthy long-term relationship, intimacy increases with time and many men and women are fortunate to have a lover who is also their best friend. Sex and romance are crucial for long-term intimacy. The stronger the sexual connection, the stronger the emotional intimacy will be. It is important to nurture and feed your relationship both emotionally and sexually. — Laura Berman

One of the things that binds us as a family is a shared sense of humor. — Ralph Fiennes

I want to stay with you. Watch over you. Follow you always. It's what I was meant to do. Blood binds us, Harry, and some fate more inextricable than that. And I want more selfish things. No one wants to die at seventeen. I want to be young and to live, and to be with the person I love, and I want to travel and see the world. And I want to get married and have children someday, and spoil them rotten so they grow up to be foul little bastards, and I want to die in bed when I'm a hundred and ninety, hexed to death by a jealous husband. — Cassandra Clare

A banal mysticism, which is so banal that all the mysticism seems to have evaporated long ago, binds 'us' to the homeland - that special place which is more than a place, more than a geophysical area. — Michael Billig

You know, being Jewish is problematic. Most people really don't know what exactly it means to be a Jew. We belong to a community of suffering, and that's what binds us together. But we are also extremely diverse. That's something I wish people who hate Jews as a group because they think they're so different would understand. We're also completely different within our own group! Essentially, we're just part of a community that has suffered a great deal, and not just in the Holocaust. — Anita Lasker-Wallfisch

Our national purpose, not our party differences, must define the American Brand. We must change the conversation from one centered around what defines our differences to one that hangs a lantern on what binds us, supports our collective well being and makes us all stronger and more productive as a result. — Alan Siegel

EMOTIONAL SHAME BINDS Our emotions are the core of our basic power. Two of the major functions they serve in our psychic life are: 1. They monitor our basic needs, telling us of a need, loss or satiation. Without our emotional energy, we would not be aware of our most fundamental needs. 2. They give us the fuel or energy to act. I like to hyphenate the word "emotion." An e-motion is energy in motion. This energy moves us to get what we need. When our basic needs are being violated, our anger moves us to fight or run. — John Bradshaw

Fate can save you and it can kill you. Either way, fate binds us through an invisible web of circumstances. Change one undesirable fate and another desirable fate is canceled out. — Cassia Leo

I give the name of cosmic sense to the more or less confused affinity that binds us psychologically to the All which envelops us. The existence of this feeling is indubitable, and apparently as old as the beginning of thought ... The cosmic sense must have been born as soon as man found himself facing the forest, the sea and the stars. — Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

Look I accept Adam because you love him. And I assume he accepts me because you love me ... your love binds us.' ... The funny thing was, I never really bought into Kim's notion that they were somehow bound together through me- until just now when I saw her half carrying him down the hospital corridor. — Gayle Forman

Faith is the subtle chain which binds us to the infinite; the voice of a deep life within, that will remain until we crowd it thence. — Elizabeth Oakes Smith

The whole world believes that performing good deeds is dharma (religion). Performing good deeds is known as laukik dharma (worldly religion, that religion which does not lead us to self-realization but binds merit karmas). — Dada Bhagwan

We're animals, I think we forget that. I think there is an ancient archetypal memory that still exists within us. If we deny that, what is the cost? So I do think it's what binds us as human beings. — Terry Tempest Williams

He watches a vid of Brin reading from the Journal of the Whills: "The truth in our soul, Is that nothing is true. The question of life Is what then do we do? The burden is ours To penance, we hew. The Force binds us all From a certain point of view." Addar fails to understand what it means, but he admits: He enjoys listening to Brin. — Chuck Wendig

No duty, however, binds us to these so-called laws, whose corrupting influence menaces what is noblest in our being ... — Benjamin Constant

Catastrophe alone sparks man's salvation. I don't mean in the religious sense, although I guess it is appropriate there, too, because believers agree that salvation comes only after death. It is part of the human near-tragedy that we learn more from loss than from gain. Gain binds us until we stumble and fall into that black pit then we find the spirit of understanding and truth. And if we fall far enough and still persist, we find our salvation. — John Kramer

Maybe we aren't so very different after all. There's good and bad in both of us, and that's what binds us together, for better or worse. — S.R. Grey

Food binds us to our roots as strongly as any song or poem. Many of us have learned more about our ancestors in the kitchen than we ever will from a book. — Anna Thomas

We have a stake in one another ... what binds us together is greater than what drives us apart. — Barack Obama

This isn't going to work," Justine murmured. "It is going to work ," I told her, keeping my tone confident. "We'll breeze right in. The Rack will be with us." Justine glanced at me with an arched eyebrow. "The Rack?" "The Rack is more than just boobs, Justine," I told her soberly. "It's an energy field created by all living boobs. It surrounds us, penetrates us, and binds the galaxy together." Andi started giggling. "You're insane." "But functionally so," I said, and adjusted myself to round out a little better. "Just let go your conscious self and act on instinct." Justine stared blankly at me for a second. Then her face lightened and she let out a little laugh. "The Rack will be with us?" I couldn't stop myself from cracking a smile. "Always. — Jim Butcher

Will not the very moment of great disillusionment with my brother or sister be incomparably wholesome for me becuase it so thoroughly teaches me that both of us can never live by our own words and deeds, but only by that one Word and deed that really binds us together, the forgiveness of sins in Jesus Christ? The bright day of Christian community dawns wherever the early morning mists of dreamy visions are lifting — Dietrich Bonhoeffer

This reduction of 'society' to a thin membrane of interactions between private individuals is presented today as the ambition of libertarians and free marketeers. But we should never forget that it was first and above all the dream of Jacobins, Bolsheviks and Nazis: if there is nothing that binds us together as a community or society, then we are utterly dependent upon the state. Governments that are too weak or discredited to act through their citizens are more likely to seek their ends by other means: by exhorting, cajoling, threatening and ultimately coercing people to obey them. The loss of social purpose articulated through public services actually increases the unrestrained powers of the over-mighty state. — Tony Judt

Ground zero is where the normal people live their lives, but not us. We live in the negatives so often that we begin to understand that life when the sun shines should be lived full throttle, soaring. The invisible tether that binds the normal people on their steady course doesn't hold us in the same way. Sometimes we walk in sunlight with everyone else. Sometimes we live underwater and fight and grow. And sometimes ... ... sometimes we fly. — Jenny Lawson

Morality binds and blinds. It binds us into ideological teams that fight each other as though the fate of the world depended on our side winning each battle. It blinds us to the fact that each team is composed of good people who have something important to say. — Jonathan Haidt

We lump together all things that are beyond the capacity of all of us collectively to understand-and one name we give to all those things together is God. Therefore, God is the creative force, the sustaining power, that which motivates toward constant change, the overall intelligence which governs the universe by physical and spiritual law, truth, love, goodness, kindness, beauty, the ever-present, all-pervading essence or spirit, which binds everything in the universe together and gives to everything in the universe.. — Peace Pilgrim

It is still possible, after all, to forge a covenant that binds us not to God in obedience but to one another in mercy. We need only choose, this year, to keep the flame lit... — Emily Franklin

Ridicule is a terrible witherer of the flower of the imagination. It binds us where we should be free. — Madeleine L'Engle

Freedom is more than just a willingness to live; it is a force that binds us all. Being truly free is seeing America as our "heart and home." Uniting around a common good will help bring us together in true happiness into the future. — Phil Mitchell

I profoundly believe that the power of food has a primal place in our homes, that binds us to the best bits of life. — Jamie Oliver

The journey of the hero is about the courage to seek the depths; the image of creative rebirth; the eternal cycle of change within us; the uncanny discovery that the seeker is the mystery which the seeker seeks to know. The hero journey is a symbol that binds, in the original sense of the word, two distant ideas, the spiritual quest of the ancients with the modern search for identity, always the one, shape-shifting yet marvelously constant story that we find. — Phil Cousineau

What binds us together is not common education, common race, common income levels, common politics, common nationality, common accents, common jobs, or anything else of that sort. Christians come together because they have all been loved by Jesus himself. They are a band of natural enemies who love one another for Jesus' sake. — D. A. Carson

It is our suffering that brings us together. It is not love. Love does not obey the mind, and 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 had 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

You are the husband of my heart, and the love of my life. Wherever I am, whatever I do, you are joined with me and I with you. The part of me that matters will live with you forever. I accept the chain that binds us with joy, because in this unity I have known the purest freedom. — Madeline Hunter

If a single writer in a country is in chains, then there are some links of that chain that binds us all. — Vaclav Havel

We have one country, one Constitution and one future that binds us. — George W. Bush

God very commonly takes on the character of a husband to us. Indeed, the union by which he binds us to himself when he receives us into the bosom of the church is like sacred wedlock. — John Calvin

The good that binds us is Love, it comes from our Soul, it flows through our center, and connects us with everything. — Alex Grey

The underlying struggle - between worlds of plenty and worlds of want; between the modern and the ancient; between those who embrace our teeming, colliding, irksome diversity, while still insisting on a set of values that binds us together, and those who would seek, under whatever flag or slogan or sacred text, a certainty and simplification that justifies cruelty toward those not like us ... — Barack Obama

faith in the eventual supremacy of reason has become so timid that we dare not enter our convictions in the open lists, to win or lose. Such fears as these are a solvent that can eat out the cement that binds the stones together; they may in the end subject us to a despotism as evil as any that we dread; and they can be allayed only in so far as we refuse to proceed on suspicion, and trust one another until we have tangible ground for misgiving. The mutual confidence on which all else depends can be maintained only by an open mind and a brave reliance upon free discussion. I do not say that — Nelson Algren

This is a time for a national conversation. A conversation about the document that binds us as a nation and a people. That document, of course, is the Constitution. — Mike DeWine

There is a certain consideration, and a general duty of humanity, that binds us not only to the animals, which have life and feeling, but even to the trees and plants. We owe justice to people, and kindness and benevolence to all other creatures who may be susceptible of it. There is some intercourse between them and us, and some mutual obligation. — Michel De Montaigne

Everyone has their weaknesses. What defines us is being able to acknowledge them and still find our strengths too. — Rebecca Espinoza

We call love what binds us to certain creatures only by reference to a collective way of seeing for which books and legends are responsible. — Albert Camus

Audiences respond in entirely different ways. One thing is unanimous - music binds us altogether. — Aleksey Igudesman

The differences were plain enough, and yet I saw that they were as nothing compared with what we had in common. As I lay in bed at night, the sky outside my window reflecting the city's dim glow, I thought about Abuelita's fierce loyalty to blood. But what really binds people as family? The way they shore themselves up with stories; the way siblings can feud bitterly but still come through for each other; how an untimely death, a child gone before a parent, shakes the very foundations; how the weaker ones, the ones with invisible wounds, are sheltered; how a constant din is medicine against loneliness; and how celebrating the same occasions year after year steels us to the changes they herald. And always food at the center of it all. — Sonia Sotomayor

Everything that surrounds us becomes part of us, it seeps into us with every experience of the flesh and of life and, like the web of a great Spider, binds us subtly to what is near, ensnares us in a fragile cradle of slow death, where we lie rocking in the wind. — Fernando Pessoa

And above all, clothe yourself with love, which binds us all in perfect harmony. — Colossians 3 14

A glance, a word
and joy or pain befalls ... How slight the links are in the chain that binds us to our destiny! — Thomas Bailey Aldrich

The major problem in our lives is to decide and clarify our responsibilities. To truly be committed to a life of honesty, love and discipline, we must be willing to commit ourselves to reality. This commitment, according to Peck, "requires the willingness and the capacity to suffer continual self-examination." Such an ability requires a good relationship with oneself. This is precisely what no shame-based person has. In fact, a toxically shamed person has an adversarial relationship with himself. Toxic shame - the shame that binds us - is a core part of neurotic and character disordered syndromes of behavior. — John Bradshaw

Hate binds us to the past and we're stuck in an unwanted emotion. — S.L. Scott

I would like to believe that the discovery of even a single fossil bacteria on Mars would teach us what we ought to know all along, and that is what binds us here on earth - all the diverse peoples here - is really much more profound than what seems to separate us. — Richard E. Berendzen

Music offers the chords that binds us together. — Jeffrey Fry

had given an oath and honor binds us to paths we might not choose. — Bernard Cornwell

We are all connected
I believed it then and believe it still now
at least in an energetic sense. And who's to say this energy is not real? We can't see gravity, either, yet we don't deny it. We can't see magnetism, yet we don't question its forcefulness. So, why, then, when people
spiritual people
talk about a force of substance that binds us all, that unites us all
when these people talk about souls
why do we dismiss them as charlatans? — Garth Stein

The American Indians, the ancient Indians would say, the metaphysical ones would say: "Power binds us together." Power, for a while, makes us what we are, perceivers, luminous perceivers of reality. — Frederick Lenz

We would also like you to know that the Church recognizes the riches of the Islamic faith - a faith that binds us to the one God. — Pope Paul VI

But they shared a dream. One of a free world. Not built on corpses, but on hope. On the love that binds us, not the hate that divides. We have lost many. But we are not broken. We are not defeated. We fight on. But we do not fight for revenge for those who have died. We fight for each other. We fight for those who live. We fight for those who don't yet live. — Pierce Brown

We both try to fight the rope that binds us, but the knots are too tight. — Corinne Michaels

We're only passers-by, and all you can do is love what you have in your life. A person has to fight the meanness that sometimes comes with you when you're born, sometimes grows if you aren't in lucky surroundings. It's our challenge to fend it off, leave it behind us choking and gasping for breath in the mud. It's our task to seek out something with truth for us, no matter if there is a hundred-mile obstacle course in the way, or a ramshackle old farmhouse that binds and binds. — Jane Hamilton

There is more to this hijab than the whole modesty thing. These girls are strangers to me but I know that we all felt an amazing connection, a sense that this cloth binds us in some kind of universal sisterhood. — Randa Abdel-Fattah

It is the image in the mind that binds us to our lost treasures, but it is the loss that shapes the image. - Colette — Judith Viorst

These five links stand out in the chain that binds our will. They hold us, guide us, coerce us - And we rattle them still. ~The Bern Seer~ — Hugh Howey

Genetically, 99.9% of the makeup of all human beings is identical, but we spend most of our time focusing on our differences. It may now be time for us to focus on what binds us together, such as our shared concerns. — Wilford Welch

This is the land of dreamings, a land of wide horizons and secret places. The first people, our ancestors, created this country in the culture that binds us to it. — Hetti Perkins

It is an unfortunate discovery certainly, that of a law which binds us where we did not know before that we were bound. — Henry David Thoreau

But the artist appeals to that part of our being which is not dependent on wisdom; to that in us which is a gift and not an acquisition - and, therefore, more permanently enduring. He speaks to our capacity for delight and wonder, to the sense of mystery surrounding our lives; to our sense of pity, and beauty, and pain; to the latent feeling of fellowship with all creation - and to the subtle but invincible conviction of solidarity that knits together the loneliness of innumerable hearts, to the solidarity in dreams, in joy, in sorrow, in aspirations, in illusions, in hope, in fear, which binds men to each other, which binds together all humanity - the dead to the living and the living to the unborn. — Joseph Conrad

the common saying has it, we think that man "lives to eat" and not "eats to live". We are continually making this mistake; we are regarding nature as ourselves and are becoming attached to it; and as soon as this attachment comes, there is the deep impression on the soul, which binds us down and makes us work not from freedom but like slaves. — Swami Vivekananda