If we love each other enough, we will bear with each other’s faults and burdens.
If you are rushed for time, sow time and you will reap time. Go to church and spend a quiet hour in prayer. You will have more time than ever and your work will get done. Sow time with the poor. Sit and listen to them, give them your time lavishly. You will reap time a hundredfold.
How much did I hear of religion as a child? Very little, and yet my heart leaped when I heard the name of God. I do believe every soul has a tendency toward God.
If you have two coats, one of them belongs to the poor.
The only way to live in any true security is to live so close to the bottom that when you fall you do not have far to drop, you do not have much to lose.
Where are the heroes and the saints, who keep a clear vision of man’s greatest gift, his freedom, to oppose not only the dictatorship of the proletariat, but also the dictatorship of the benevolent state, which takes possession of the family, and of the indigent, and claims our young for war?
To love with understanding and without understanding. To love blindly, and to folly. To see only what is loveable. To think only of these things. To see the best in everyone around, their virtues rather than their faults. To see Christ in them!
They cannot see that we must lay one brick at a time, take one step at a time.
It is not easy always to be joyful, to keep in mind the duty of delight.
No matter how corrupt the Church may become, it carries within it the seeds of its own regeneration.
As for ourselves, yes, we must be meek, bear injustice, malice, rash judgment. We must turn the other cheek, give up our cloak, go a second mile.
We are not, most of us, capable of exalted emotion, save rarely.
If you are going to try and change things, you had better have your wits about you.
It is only through religion that communism can be achieved, and has been achieved over and over.
The only answer in this life, to the loneliness we are all bound to feel, is community.
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.