Universality Quotes

“I am here; and here is nowhere in particular.”
― William Golding, The Spire

“Individual cultures and ideologies have their appropriate uses but none of them erase or replace the universal experiences, like love and weeping and laughter, common to all human beings.”
― Aberjhani, Splendid Literarium: A Treasury of Stories, Aphorisms, Poems, and Essays

“Hoedom is universal.”
― Angie Thomas, The Hate U Give

“History is a hermaphrodite with many distinguished lovers. We are neither mysteries nor strangers but the living breath of revelation made flesh by the unrestrained desires of a free and universal love. Universal me. Universal you.”
--from Past Present and Future are One”
― Aberjhani, Elemental: The Power of Illuminated Love

“The Christian is not to become a Hindu or a Buddhist, nor is a Hindu or a Buddhist to become a Christian. But each must assimilate the spirit of the others and yet preserve his individuality and grow according to his own law of growth. If the Parliament of Religions has shown anything to the world, it is this: It has proved to the world that holiness, purity, and charity are not the exclusive possessions of any church in the world, and that every system has produced men and women of the most exalted character. In the face of this evidence, if anybody dreams of the exclusive survival of his own religion at the expense of the others, I pity him from the bottom of my heart and point out to him that upon the banner of every religion will soon be written, in spite of resistance: "Help and not Fight," "Assimilation and not Destruction," "Harmony and Peace and not Dissension".”
― Swami Vivekananda

“Love is our most basic human value and also our highest potential.”
― Kamand Kojouri

“Of all the conceptions of the divine, of all the language Jesus could put on the lips of the God character in the story he tells, that’s what he has the Father say. “You are always with me, and everything I have is yours.” ...

Millions of people in our world were told that God so loved the world, that God sent his son to save the world, and that if they accept and believe in Jesus, then they’ll be able to have a relationship with God...

But there’s more. Millions have been taught that if they don’t believe, if they don’t accept in the right way, that is, the way the person telling them "the gospel" does, and they were hit by a car and died later that same day, God will have no choice but to punish them forever in conscious torment in hell... A loving heavenly father who will go to extraordinary lengths to have a relationship with them would, in the blink of an eye, become a cruel, mean, vicious tormentor who would ensure that they had no escape from an endless future of agony... if your God is loving one second and cruel the next, if your God will punish people for all eternity for sins committed in a few short years, no amount of clever marketing or compelling language or good music or great coffee will be able to disguise that one, true, glaring, untenable, acceptable, awful reality... sometimes the reason people have a problem accepting the gospel is that they sense that the God lurking behind Jesus isn’t safe, loving, or good. It doesn’t make sense, it can’t be reconciled, and so they say no... God creates, because the endless joy and peace and shared life at the heart of this God knows no other way. Jesus invites us into THAT relationship, the one at the center of the universe... so when the gospel is diminished to a question of whether or not a person will “get into heaven,” that reduces the good news to a ticket, a way to get past the bouncer and into the club. The good news is better than that. (excerpts all from chapter 7)”
― Rob Bell, Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived

“There is no home left for universal souls, except perhaps in Antarctica or on the high seas.”
― J.M. Coetzee, Life & Times of Michael K

“If emotions were universal, then in one sense he was not alone, never had been alone, and never could be alone....No pain or happiness was unique. All humanity drank from the same river of emotion; and by drinking, every race, religion, and nationality became one indivisible species.”
― Dean Koontz, Key to Midnight / Shattered / House of Thunder

“When we love our hate, we stop hating. Love always wins. To love hatred means to welcome it. It doesn’t mean that we should do what it tells us to do, but we shouldn’t suppress it either. When we love hatred we put ourselves out of the process of hatred, and love begins.”
― Francis Lucille, The Perfume of Silence

“Will I ever be able to say, "Today it writes," just like "Today it rains," "Today it is windy"?”
― Italo Calvino

“Culture cannot be a monolithically universal phenomenon without some kind of demonic imposition of one culture over the rest of cultures. Nor is it possible to dream of a universal "Christian culture" without denying the dialectic between history and eschatology which is so central, among other things, to the eucharist itself. Thus, if there is a transcendence of cultural divisions on a universal level - which indeed must be constantly aimed at by the Church - it can only take place via the local situations expressed in and through the particular local Churches and not through universalistic structures which imply a universal Church.”
― John D. Zizioulas, Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church

“If the world is listening to your music, then you have made really a good music! If only those in your country are listening to your music, sit down and make music again! Keep making music until the whole world is your listener!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“Si c'est un homme, c'est mon prochain, pas mon lointain.”
― Éric-Emmanuel Schmitt, La Part de l'autre

“People are somewhat gorgeous collections of chemical fires, aren't they? Cells and organs burn and smolder, each one, and hot electricity flows and creates storms of further currents, magnetisms and species of gravity--we are towers of kinds of fires, down to the tiniest constituents of ourselves, whatever those are, those things burn like stars in space, in helpless mimicry of the vastness out there, electrons and neutrons, planets and suns, so that we are made of universes of fires contained in skin and placed in turn within a turning and lumbering universe of fires...”
― Harold Brodkey, Women and Angels

“No place works any different than any other place, really, beyond mere details. The universal human laws--need, love for the beloved, fear, hunger, periodic exaltation, the kindness that rises up naturally in the absence of hunger/fear/pain--are constant, predictable, reliable, universal, and are merely ornamented with the details of local culture. What a powerful thing to know: that one's own desires are mappable onto strangers; that what one finds in oneself will most certainly be found in The Other--perhaps muted, exaggerated, or distorted, yes, but there nonetheless, and thus a source of comfort.”
― George Saunders, The Braindead Megaphone

“When one abdicates universality, one obtains universal horror.”
― Alain Badiou, Theory of the Subject

“... each point in the universe must make up its own mind on the question of acknowledgement before acknowledgement can be considered universal.”
― Vikram Seth

“The essence of diversity is the individual's experience of it. Diversity is about personalised shades of experience emanating from universal colours of humanity, but each person takes from the universal what is relevant to them and alters it by their own interpersonal experience.”
― Camila Batmanghelidjh, Anti-Discriminatory Practice in Counselling & Psychotherapy

“The principle of universality is not a 'theory'. Just moral truism.”
― Noam Chomsky

“When we fancy ourselves to be a particular thing with a name, we see ourselves as we would a cork in a stream. What we do not realize is that there is only stream. What we fancy as particular is, from the first, only movement, change and flow.”
― Steve Hagen, Buddhism Plain & Simple: The Practice of Being Aware, Right Now, Every Day

“I now see the oneness and wholeness of my world, and bring uplifting compassion to others. I now help create and manifest positive, compassionate groups where we all help support each other’s journeys.”
― Andrew Lutts, How to Live a Magnificent Life: Becoming the Living Expression of Higher Consciousness

“They have not the slightest awareness of how restricted their idea of "universality" is and of how few they are thinking when they talk about "everybody" and "anybody". Their universalism is a fellowship of the elite - of the elite as formed by absolutism. There is hardly a rule or a requirement of classicistic aesthetics which is not based on the ideas of this absolutism. The desire is that art should have a unifor character, like the state, should produce the effect of formal perfection, like the movement of a corps, that it should be clear and precise, like a decree, and be governed by absolute rules, like the life of every subject in the state. The artist should be no more left to his own devices than any other citizen; he should rather be guided by the law, by regulations, so as not to go astray in the wilderness of his own imagination.”
― Arnold Hauser, The Social History of Art: Volume 2: Renaissance, Mannerism, Baroque

“The universality of the church was illustrated in a marvelously effective manner. White, black, yellow members of religious orders orders—everyone was in clerical robes united under the church. It truly seems ideal.”
― Dietrich Bonhoeffer

“When the term universal comes up, ask: Whose universe? When the term timeless: Who can stand outside of time? When transcends categories: Why not transgress? I don’t want to transcend. I want to sing about living in a tangle of histories and dreams. Embrace that song, I’m reminding myself.”
― Chen Chen

“We didn't come all this way to replace stone with concrete – we must have heart, we must have dreams, we must have a genuine, invincible desire for universality - otherwise we’ll end up with concrete buildings bearing concrete beings.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Hometown Human: To Live for Soil and Society

“Sentiments, sapience and sentience speak the same tongue no matter the geography.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Handcrafted Humanity: 100 Sonnets for A Blunderful World

“If your ideas are only about the world, then you have very local ideas! You must universalize your ideas to include the space above your head!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“Giants in Jeans Sonnet 15

I am the craftsman,
I am the craft.
I am the artist,
I am the art.
I am the infinity,
I am absolution.
I am impossibility,
I am the solution.
I am the just,
As well as justice.
I am equality,
As well as its means.
There's always a way, so long as I exist,
And I exist wherever there's a Universalist.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Giants in Jeans: 100 Sonnets of United Earth

“Pain is a great teacher, a wake-up call to the young and old, poor and rich.”
― Luckson T Mabade