We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow men; and among those fibers, as sympathetic threads, our actions run as causes, and they come back to us as effects.

Ye cannot live for yourselves; a thousand fibres connect you with your fellow-men, and along those fibres, as along sympathetic threads, run your actions as causes, and return to you as effects.

No story sits by itself. Our lives connect like threads on a loom, interwoven in ways we never realise.

We don’t accomplish anything in the world alone and whatever happens is the result of the whole tapestry off one’s life and all the weavings of individual threads from one to another that create something.

The truth, even more, is that life is perpetually weaving fresh threads which link one individual and one event to another, and that these threads are crossed and recrossed, doubled and redoubled to thicken the web, so that between any slightest point of our past and all the others a rich network of memories gives us an almost infinite variety of communicating paths to choose from.

We live together, we act on, and react to one another; but always, and in all circumstances, we are by ourselves.

Living a connected life leads one to take a different view. Life is less a quest than a quilt. We find meaning, love, and prosperity through the process of stitching together our bold attempts to help others find their own way in their lives. The relationships we weave become an exquisite and endless pattern.

It may even be that, as you look more closely, to recognize the hidden seed which, born of a secret union, grows into a luxuriant plant and spreads forth into a thousand tendrils, until a single blossom, swelling to maturity, absorbs all the life-sap and kills the seed itself. [...] I came to feel that what we call simply dream and imagination might represent the secret thread that runs through our lives and links its varied facets; and that the man who thinks that, because he has perceived this, he has acquired the power to break the thread and challenge that mysterious force which rules us, is to be given up as lost.

Our job is not to comprehend or control everything, but to learn which story we are in and which of the many things calling out in the world is calling to us. Our job is to be fully alive in the life we have, to pick up the invisible thread of our own story and follow where it leads. Our job is to find the thread of our own dream and live it all the way to the end.

An individual life is one thread in the tapestry and what is one thread compared to the whole?

The truth is that we are all in this together. What affects one directly affects all indirectly. We are all bound together in a delicate network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly.

These two threads that run through our life — one pulling us into the world to achieve and make things happen, the other pulling us back from the world to nourish and replenish ourselves — can seem at odds, but in fact they reinforce each other.

We live together,we act on, and react to, one another; but always and in all circumstances we are by ourselves. The martyrs go hand and hand into the arena; they are crucified alone.

We have woven a web, you and I, attached to this world but a separate world of our own invention.