Excerpt: Brandon Stanton’s new book, Humans, is a masterpiece. These quotes from Humans give a behind-the-scenes look at how he works and thinks.
Book Overview: Brandon Stanton created Humans of New York in 2010. What began as a photographic census of life in New York City, soon evolved into a storytelling phenomenon. A global audience of millions began following HONY daily. Over the next several years, Stanton broadened his lens to include people from across the world. Traveling to more than forty countries, he conducted interviews across continents, borders, and language barriers. Humans is the definitive catalogue of these travels. The faces and locations will vary from page to page, but the stories will feel deeply familiar. Told with candor and intimacy, Humans will resonate with readers across the globe―providing a portrait of our shared experience.
Buy from Amazon! Not on Audible…
Great on Kindle. Great Experience. Great Value. The Kindle edition of this book comes highly recommended on Amazon.
Post(s) Inspired by this Book:
“Separateness is a myth. The content of both your physical and mental bodies has been gathered from the outside. They belong to you but they are not you. If you want to go the way your body is going currently, you should know that it is going straight to the grave. Similarly, whatever you know as the mind is a complex mess of all the stuff that it has been accumulating. The objectives of the mind are entirely self-created. They may seem to be fine right now, but they usually take you completely away from the process of life. So, if you go the way your mind goes, you should know you are heading toward an alternative psychological creation; it may be fascinating, stimulating, or even comforting for a length of time, but it bears no relation at all to existential reality.”
Sadhguru, Inner Engineering (Page 210)
“Responsibility is not burdensome. Boundaries are burdensome. If you draw yourself a boundary, whether of ideology, caste, creed, race, or religion, you cannot move beyond it and you end up stuck for no reason at all. These boundaries only end up breeding fear, hatred, and anger. The bigger your boundary, the more burdensome it becomes. But if your responsibility is limitless, where’s the boundary? No boundary, no burden. This is the turnaround in human consciousness that needs to take place. Once this happens, it is not that the cosmos begins to happen your way. Instead, what you are becomes cosmic. This is not transcendence; this is homecoming.”
Sadhguru, Inner Engineering (Page 69)
“There’s a thing that worries me sometimes when you talk about creativity because it can have this kind of feel that it’s just nice, or warm, or pleasant—it’s not. It’s vital. It’s the way we heal each other. In singing our song, in telling our story, in inviting you to say, ‘Hey, listen to me and I’ll listen to you,’ we’re starting a dialog. And when you do that this healing happens. And we come out of our corners. And we start to witness each other’s common humanity. We start to assert it. And when we do that? Really good things happen.”
Ethan Hawke, TED
“To make life a little better for people less fortunate than you, that’s what I think a meaningful life is. One lives not just for oneself but for one’s community.”
Ruth Bader Ginsburg, CNN
Excerpt: The sneak attack of a track on Logic’s 2017 album, Everybody, that got everybody thinking about life, death, interconnectedness, and unity. Let’s look at the lyrics and deeper meaning of Waiting Room by Logic.
Excerpt: The Egg by Andy Weir is an incredibly profound and thought-provoking short story about interconnectedness, oneness, and the meaning of life and death. A must read for anybody who is curious about why we might be here and what this experience of life might be all about.
“When you step back from the enormity of your own immediate experience—whatever it is—you are able to see the experience of others and either connect with them or lessen the intensity of your own pain. We are all strands in a long rope that stretches back countless generations and ties together every person in every country on every continent. We are all thinking and feeling the same things, we are all made of and motivated by the same things. We are all stardust.”
Ryan Holiday, Stillness is the Key (Page 160)
Once, an anthropologist proposed a game to kids in an African tribe. He put a basket full of fruit near a tree and told them that whoever got there first would win the entire basket. When he gave them the signal to run, they all took each other’s hands and ran together. Once they arrived at the tree, they sat in a circle and enjoyed the fruits together. When he asked them why they chose to run as a group when they could have raced against each other for the whole basket, one child spoke up and said, “UBUNTU—how can one of us be happy if all the other ones are sad?”
Read More »Quote about Ubuntu and How We Are All Connected
Excerpt: There are countless things that divide us. But, what divides us is secondary to what unites us. Read our 27 quotes on unity to learn more.
“At the end of the day, you can either focus on what’s tearing you apart, or what’s holding you together.”
Rob Dyer
There is a lot happening right now that can make us feel like we’re being torn apart. With the threat and spread of the Coronavirus (COVID-19), there is more and more happening each day that is moving us further and further apart and into smaller and smaller groups (even into isolation). Everything from the biggest organizational gatherings in the world to the most remote meetings in our own backyard are being postponed and cancelled to prevent the spread of the virus. During this time when we are being forced apart physically, we need to find ways to continue to come together mentally and emotionally.
Read More »Rob Dyer Quote on Staying Focused On The Right Things—Things That Bring Us Together“Looking deeply into the flower, we see that the flower is made of non-flower elements. We describe the flower as being full of everything. There is nothing that is not present in the flower. We see sunshine, we see the rain, we see clouds, we see the earth, and we also see time and space in the flower. A flower, like everything else, is made entirely of non-flower elements. The whole cosmos has come together in order to help the flower manifest herself. The flower is full of everything except one thing: a separate self, a separate identity.” ~ Thich Nhat Hanh, No Death, No Fear
“When you look at the surface of the ocean, you can see waves coming up and going down. You can describe these waves in terms of high or low, big or small, more vigorous or less vigorous, more beautiful or less beautiful. You can describe a wave in terms of beginning and end, birth and death. That can be compared to the historical dimension. In the historical dimension, we are concerned with birth and death, more powerful, less powerful, more beautiful, less beautiful, beginning and end and so on. Looking deeply, we can also see that the waves are at the same time water. A wave may like to seek its own true nature. The wave might suffer from fear, from complexes. A wave may say, ‘I am not as big as the other waves,’ ‘I am oppressed,’ ‘I am not as beautiful as the other waves,’ ‘I have been born and I have to die.’ The wave may suffer from these things, these ideas. But if the wave bends down and touches her true nature she will realize that she is water. Then her fear and complexes will disappear.” ~ Thich Nhat Hanh, No Death, No Fear
“If you look at a friend with the eyes of a meditator, you will see in him or her all generations of their ancestors. You will be very respectful to them and to your own body because you will see their body and your body as the sacred home of all our ancestors. You will also see that our bodies are the source of all future generations. We will not damage our bodies, because that wouldn’t be kind to our descendants. We do not use drugs and we do not eat or drink things that have toxins or that will harm our bodies. This is because our insight of manifestation helps us to live in a healthy way, with clarity and responsibility.” ~ Thich Nhat Hanh, No Death, No Fear
“Walking slowly in the moonlight through the rows of tea plants, I noticed my mother was still with me. She was the moonlight caressing me as she had done so often, very tender, very sweet… wonderful! Each time my feet touched the earth I knew my mother was there with me. I knew this body was not mine alone but a living continuation of my mother and my father and my grandparents and great-grandparents. Of all my ancestors. These feet that I saw as ‘my’ feet were actually ‘our’ feet. Together my mother and I were leaving footprints in the damp soil.” ~ Thich Nhat Hanh, No Death, No Fear
