Verbatim

Because one’s acquaintances are less likely linked than one’s close friends, they connect individuals to other social circles, providing a vital resource for such tasks as finding jobs. Cliques are bridged by weak ties, which are therefore crucial for transmission of information and for social cohesion.
Mark Granovetter, The Strength of Weak Ties, American Journal of [...]

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If you had the only telephone in the world, who would you call? Networks seem to grow more valuable to a user proportionately with the number of other users he or she can call. In a network with N users, each sees a value proportional to the N-1 others, so the total value of the [...]

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Relationships are all there is. Everything in the universe only exists because it is in relationship to everything else. Nothing exists in isolation. We [...]

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LOW at my problem bending, Another problem comes, Larger than mine, serener, Involving statelier sums; I check my busy pencil, My ciphers slip away, Wherefore, my baffled fingers, Time Eternity?
Emily Dickinson, Part Five: The Single Hound, LXXX, The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, 1924; from Bartleby.com

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Proprioception, the perception of movement and spatial orientation arising from stimuli inside the body, is a medical concept. Although the name for it is not well known, the phenomemon is familiar to all of us. Our proprioceptors incessantly inform us that we are standing up, inclining our head, squinting our eyes, or clenching our fists. [...]

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Why, then ’tis none to you, for there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so. To me it is a prison.”
William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act II, Sc. II; Hamlet’s response to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern who question Hamlet’s regard of Denmark as a prison - “We think not so, my lord.” The originator [...]

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Everything said is said by someone.
Humberto R. Maturana & Francisco J. Varela, The Tree of Knowledge: The Biological Roots of Human Understanding, 1999, p. 26.
Everything is said by someone in the expectation of being understood by someone else. Everything heard as being said is heard being said by someone and calls for a response.
Klaus Krippendorff, [...]

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A young black South African woman taught some of my friends a profound lesson about listening. She was sitting in a circle of women from many nations, and each woman had the chance to tell a story from her life. When her turn came, she began quietly to tell a story of true horror–of how [...]

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Conscience is a creator of meaning. As a sense of constraint rooted in our emotional ties to one another, it prevents life from devolving into nothing but a long and essentially boring game of attempted dominance over our fellow human beings, and for every limitation conscience imposes on us, it gives us a moment of [...]

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