Sociable Quotes - page 2
Our most provident and glorious Creator so furnished countries with severall commodities that amongst all there might be sociable conversation; and, one standing in need of the other, all might be combined in a common league, and exhibite mutuall succours. This abundance of all countries in everything, and defect of every country in most things, maintaineth in all regions and every province a most strict combination. So that, as in the body of the little world, the head cannot say to the foot, nor the foot to the head, 'I stand in no need of thee:' so, in the body of the great world, Europe cannot say to Asia, nor Asia to Africke, 'I want not your commodities, nor am defective in that of which thou boastest of abundance.'
Peter Heylin
According to the seventeenth-century way of thinking, an atheist was by definition a decadent. If there was no God (or, at least, no providential, rewarding-and-punishing God of the sort worshipped in all the traditional religions), the reasoning went, then everything is permitted. So a non-beliver would be expected to indulge in all manner of sensual stimulation... to lie, cheat, and steal...
Spinoza, according to all seventeenth-century interpreters, rejected all the traditional ideas about God; he was indesputably a heretic. Yet his manner of living was humble and apparently free of vice. Then, as now, the philosopher seemed a living oxymoron: he was an ascetic sensualist, a spiritual materialist, a sociable hermit, a secular saint. How could his life have been so good, the critics asked, when his philosophy was so bad?
Baruch Spinoza
In the animal world we have seen that the vast majority of species live in societies, and that they find in association the best arms for the struggle for life: understood, of course, in its wide Darwinian sense - not as a struggle for the sheer means of existence, but as a struggle against all natural conditions unfavourable to the species. The animal species, in which individual struggle has been reduced to its narrowest limits, and the practice of mutual aid has attained the greatest development, are invariably the most numerous, the most prosperous, and the most open to further progress. The mutual protection which is obtained in this case, the possibility of attaining old age and of accumulating experience, the higher intellectual development, and the further growth of sociable habits, secure the maintenance of the species, its extension, and its further progressive evolution. The unsociable species, on the contrary, are doomed to decay.
Peter Kropotkin