no man is an island

Syllable breakdown

Dictionary meaning

no person is truly self-sufficient or entirely independent; all human beings are interconnected and depend on others for meaning, sustenance, and identity; the phrase comes from the meditation of the seventeenth-century poet and clergyman John Donne, who wrote that every person's death diminishes all of humanity because we are part of a common whole; it is used to argue against extreme individualism and to remind people of their fundamental embeddedness in community and relationship