Quotes & Sayings About Fraternity Life

What a vast fraternity it is,
that of 'Hearts that Ache.' For the last three months it has seemed to me as though all society were coming to me, to drop its mask for a moment and initiate me into the mystery. How we do suffer! And we go on laughing; for, as a practical joke at our expense, life is a success. — Henry Adams

Political democracy cannot last unless there lies at the base of it social democracy. What does social democracy mean? It means a way of life which recognizes liberty, equality and fraternity as the principles of life. — B.R. Ambedkar

For while religion prescribes brotherly love in the relations among the individuals and groups, the actual spectacle more resembles a battlefield than an orchestra. Everywhere, in economic as well as in political life, the guiding principle is one of ruthless striving for success at the expense of one's fellow. men. This competitive spirit prevails even in school and, destroying all feelings of human fraternity and cooperation, conceives of achievement not as derived from the love for productive and thoughtful work, but as springing from personal ambition and fear of rejection. — Albert Einstein

It was once necessary to go from somebody to nothing to become everything. — Darnell Lamont Walker

But it doesn't happen that way, I keep telling myself knowingly and sadly. Only in our fraternity pledges and masonic inductions, our cowboy movies and magazine stories, not in our real-life lives. For, the seventeenth-century humanist to the contrary, each man is an island complete unto himself, and as he sinks, the moving feet go on around him, from nowhere to nowhere and with no time to lose. The world is long past the Boy Scout stage of its development; now each man dies as he was meant to die, and as he was born, and as he lived: alone, all alone. Without any God, without any hope, without any record to show for his life.
("New York Blues") — Cornell Woolrich

A school of esotericism usually arises in connection with some special realization of the Truth, which it sometimes stresses beyond its due proportion to life as a whole, but there will never be found any teaching which has the power to hold together a body of earnest seekers which has not a spark of the divine fire at its heart; therefore respect should be given to all how seek in sincerity, however far from the goal they may appear to be, and all who are engaged in the great Quest should rather try to see the vision which a brother has glimpsed than the special errors to which he has fallen victim. — Dion Fortune

In ten phrases, the ten commandments express the essential of life. And these three words
liberty, equality, and fraternity
do just as much. Millions of people have died for those ideals. — Krzysztof Kieslowski

From the boys' point of view, scouting puts them into fraternity-gangs, which is their natural organisation, whether for games, mischief, or loafing; it gives them a smart dress and equipments; it appeals to their imagination and romance; and it engages them in an active, open-air life. — Robert Baden-Powell

Of a sudden he felt that fraternity life was the only way to exist at college. How could he have doubted? (126) — Ferrol Sams

David Rockefeller is the most conspicuous representative today of the ruling class, a multinational fraternity of men who shape the global economy and manage the flow of its capital. Rockefeller was born to it, and he has made the most of it. But what some critics see as a vast international conspiracy, he considers a circumstance of life and just another day's work ... In the world of David Rockefeller it's hard to tell where business ends and politics begins — Bill Moyers

Life's going to change. You thought it already had? Not nearly as much as it's going to change now.
Everything you disapprove of you'll call "aristocratic." This term can be applied to food, to books and plays, to modes of speech, to hairstyles and to such venerable institutions as prostitution and the Roman Catholic Church.
If "Liberty" was the watchword of the first Revolution, "Equality" is that of the second. "Fraternity" is a less assertive quality, and must creep in where it may. — Hilary Mantel

The idea that you live your life in phases - I've never bought that. I feel like I'm the same person who sat in at the draft board in 1965, I'm the same person who joined a fraternity, I'm the same person who got an MFA at Bennington, and I'm the same person who founded Weather Underground. My values are still intact. — Bill Ayers

Indians today are governed by two different ideologies. Their political ideal set in the preamble of the Constitution affirms a life of liberty, equality and fraternity. Their social ideal embodied in their religion denies them. — B.R. Ambedkar

[A] great novel will allow you to transcend the social, racial and political limitations imposed by the vicissitudes of life and to find a deep fraternity based on empathy. — Azar Nafisi

I would say my fraternity was nothing but a bunch of farm boys; we weren't really in the whole fraternity scene, but yeah, that's a safe assessment of who I am. I've lived that life, growing up in agriculture and then going off to college and joining a fraternity, livin' that life. — Luke Bryan

All my life I have been a poor go-to-sleeper. People in trains, who lay their newspaper aside, fold their silly arms, and immediately, with an offensive familiarity of demeanour, start snoring, amaze me as much as the uninhibited chap who cozily defecates in the presence of a chatty tubber, or participates in huge demonstrations, or joins some union in order to dissolve in it. Sleep is the most moronic fraternity in the world, with the heaviest dues and the crudest rituals. It is a mental torture I find debasing. The strain and drain of composition often force me, alas, to swallow a strong pill that gives me an hour or two of frightful nightmares or even to accept the comic relief of a midday snooze, the way a senile rake might totter to the nearest euthanasium; but I simply cannot get used to the nightly betrayal of reason, humanity, genius. No matter how great my weariness, the wrench of parting with consciousness is unspeakably repulsive to me. — Vladimir Nabokov

Playing along with Guyland may be the only way an individual woman might believe she has a chance at a social life or a relationship. Sometimes it gets pretty crazy, like a sorority requiring that all the pledges sleep with the members of the "brother" fraternity. — Michael Kimmel

In the production of a good play with a good cast and a knowing director a kind of banding-together occurs; there is formed a fraternity whose members share a mutual sense of destiny. In these five blocks, where the rapping of the tap-dancer's feet and the bawling of the phonographs in the record-shop mix with the roar of the Broadway traffic; where the lonely, the perverted, and the lost wander like souls in Dante's hell and the life of the spirit seems impossible, there are still little circles of actors in the dead silence of empty theaters, with a director in their center, and a new creation of life taking place — Arthur Miller

(Speaking of the Cistercian monks) A grim fraternity, passing grim lives in that sweet spot, that God had made so bright! Strange that Nature's voices all around them
the soft singing of the waters, the wisperings of the river grass, the music of the rushing wind
should not have taught them a truer meaning of life than this. They listened there, through the long days, in silence, waiting for a voice from heaven; and all day long and through the solemn night it spoke to them in myriad tones, and they heard it not. — Jerome K. Jerome

He had seen the worst and best of the rest, and had gone from a fraternity of men bent on trivial gain by any means, including murder, to a fellowship of men who would sacrifice even their own lives for the greater good.
His ambition was to be like them, to be noble by strength of purpose and clarity of vision rather than by accident of birth. — Raymond E. Feist

You punk asshole. What was this? A game for you? This is my life's work you just annihilated and for what? Shits and giggles? Or was this nothing more than a fraternity prank? Please tell me that you didn't just ruin my integrity to get some kind of drinking points. This is something I've been working for since before you were born. How dare you make a mockery of me. I hope to God that one day someone degrades you like this so that you'll know, just once in your spoiled pompous life, what humiliation feels like! (Tory) — Sherrilyn Kenyon

The Bear had once confided to me that Durrell's ego could fit snugly in the basilica of St. Peter's in Rome but in very few other public places. This runaway megalomania marked him as a blood member of the fraternity of generals. If looks alone could make generals, Durrell would have been a cinch. He was built lean and slim and dark, like a Doberman. A man of breeding and refrigerated intelligence, he ordered his life like a table of logarithms. — Pat Conroy

Even older and just as rich, the ritual of Kappa Alpha Order thrilled his soul and permeated his mind. By the end of the ceremony he was so awed, so filled with idealism, so saturated with nebulous aspirations, that he gazed with love on all his brothers ... He floated down the stairs of the old Administration Building that night new born and shining, warm and secure in the midst of a group that no outside force could penetrate nor unsuspected evil ever tarnish. Porter was a Knight of Kappa Alpha Order (193) — Ferrol Sams

To acquire the full consciousness of self is to know oneself so different from others that no longer feels allied with men except by purely animal contacts: nevertheless, among souls of this degree, there is an ideal fraternity based on differences,
while society fraternity is based on resemblances.
The full consciousness of self can be called originality of soul, -and all this is said only to point out the group of rare beings to which Andre Gide belongs.
The misfortune of these beings, when they express themselves, is that they do it with such odd gestures that men fear to approach them; their life of social contacts must often revolve in the brief circle of ideal fraternities; or, when the mob consents to admit such souls, it is as curiosities or museum objects. Their glory is, finally, to be loved from afar & almost understood, as parchments are seen & read above sealed cases. — Remy De Gourmont

Genius guarantees the faculties of the heart. Man is no less immortal than the soul. Great thoughts spring from reason! Fraternity is not a myth. Newborn children know nothing of life, not even greatness. In misfortune, friends increase. — Comte De Lautreamont