One of the greatest evils of the day among those outside of prison is their sense of futility. Young people say, What is the sense of our small effort? They cannot see that we must lay one brick at a time, take one step at a time; we can be responsible only for the one action of the present moment.
Paperwork, cleaning the house, dealing with the innumerable visitors who come all through the day, answering the phone, keeping patience and acting intelligently, which is to find some meaning in all that happens-these things, too, are the works of peace, and often seem like a very little way.
The holy man was the whole man, the man of integrity, who not only tried to change the world, but to live in it as it was.
Christ is God or He is the world’s greatest liar and imposter.
We are all called to be saints, St. Paul says, and we might as well get over our bourgeois fear of the name. We might also get used to recognizing the fact that there is some of the saint in all of us.
It is people who are important, not the masses.
We are the nation the most powerful, the most armed and we are supplying arms and money to the rest of the world where we are not ourselves fighting. We are eating while there is famine in the world.
I too complain ceaselessly in my heart and in my words too. My very life is a protest. Against government, for instance.
Writing is hard work. But if you want to become a writer you will become one. Nothing will stop you.
When you love people, you see all the good in them, all the Christ in them.
It is best to disregard their talk and judge only their actions...
Recording happiness made it last longer, we felt, and recording sorrow dramatized it and took away its bitterness; and often we settled some problem which beset us even while we wrote about it.
I offered up a special prayer, a prayer which came with tears and anguish, that some way would open up for me to use what talents I possessed for my fellow workers, for the poor.
I have been disillusioned, however, this long, long time in the means used by any but the saints to live in this world God has made for us.
The works of mercy are the opposite of the works of war, feeding the hungry, sheltering the homeless, nursing the sick, visiting the prisoner. But we are destroying crops, setting fire to entire villages and to the people in them. We are not performing the works of mercy but the works of war.
For me Christ was not to be bought for thirty pieces of silver but with my heart’s blood. We buy not cheap in this market.
Often we comfort ourselves only with words, but if we pray enough, the conviction will come too that Christ is our King, not Stalin, Bevins, or Truman. That He has all things in His hands, that ’all things work together for good for those that love Him.
Our faith is stronger than death, our philosophy is firmer than flesh, and the spread of the Kingdom of God upon the earth is more sublime and more compelling.
It is we ourselves that we have to think about, no one else. That is the way the saints worked. They paid attention to what they were doing, and if others were attracted to them by their enterprise, why, well and good. But they looked to themselves first of all.
Knitting is very conducive to thought. It is nice to knit a while, put down the needles, write a while, then take up the sock again.