The good we secure for ourselves is precarious and uncertain until it is secured for all of us and incorporated into our common life.

Jane Addams
About This Quote

The good we secure for ourselves is precarious and uncertain until it is secured for all of us and incorporated into our common life. Today we can find ourselves in a position to give without receiving. We feel great because we help ourselves and others. We feel we have done well, but we do not see that we have done wrong to others.

In such a situation, we need to let go of the idea of our own good. To do this, there must be a sense of connection to other people. This connection should not be limited to received goods or services; it should include the things that we give others, such as love and friendship and help and encouragement and respect and encouragement and caring and sharing and patience and understanding and forgiveness and compassion and respect for the dignity of every human being.

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  2. I love mankind, he said, "but I find to my amazement that the more I love mankind as a whole, the less I love man in particular. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
  3. To love another human in all of her splendor and imperfect perfection , it is a magnificent task...tremendous and foolish and human. - Louise Erdrich
  4. People say I make strange choices, but they’re not strange for me. My sickness is that I’m fascinated by human behavior, by what’s underneath the surface, by the worlds inside people. - Johnny Depp
  5. Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal. - Albert Camus
More Quotes By Jane Addams
  1. The good we secure for ourselves is precarious and uncertain until it is secured for all of us and incorporated into our common life.
  2. Perhaps nothing is so fraught with significance as the human hand, this oldest tool with which man has dug his way from savagery, and with which he is constantly groping forward.
  3. True peace is not merely the absence of war, it is the presence of justice.
  4. In the unceasing ebb and flow of justice and oppression we must all dig channels as best we may, that at the propitious moment somewhat of the swelling tide may be conducted to the barren places of life.
  5. Social advance depends as much upon the process through which it is secured as upon the result itself.
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