We have all known the long loneliness and we have learned that the only solution is love and that love comes with community.
The greatest challenge of the day is: how to bring about a revolution of the heart, a revolution which has to start with each one of us?
Don’t worry about being effective. Just concentrate on being faithful to the truth.
When it comes down to it, even on the natural plane, it is much happier and more enlivening to love than to be loved.
Writing is hard work. But if you want to become a writer you will become one. Nothing will stop you.
As Dostoevski said: ‘Love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared with love in dreams.
The Gospel takes away our right forever, to discriminate between the deserving and the undeserving poor.
The vanity of Eve, that desire to exercise power, to seduce, to drag down!
Our problems stem from our acceptance of this filthy, rotten system.
I have long since come to believe that people never mean half of what they say, and that it is best to disregard their talk and judge only their actions.
Those who cannot see Christ in the poor are atheists indeed.
If I had written the greatest book, composed the greatest symphony, painted the most beautiful painting or carved the most exquisite figure I could not have felt the more exalted creator than I did when they placed my child in my arms.
Don’t call me a saint. I don’t want to be dismissed so easily.
Everything a baptized person does every day should be directly or indirectly related to the Corporal and Spiritual Works of Mercy.
There are two things you should know about the poor: they tend to smell, and they are ungrateful.
No one has a right to sit down and feel hopeless. There’s too much work to do.
Men are beginning to realize that they are not individuals but persons in society, that man alone is weak and adrift, that he must seek strength in common action.
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.
Food for the body is not enough. There must be food for the soul.
Women think with their whole bodies and they see things as a whole more than men do.
Love casts out fear, but we have to get over the fear in order to get close enough to love them.
I believe that we must reach our brother, never toning down our fundamental oppositions, but meeting him when he asks to be met, with a reason for the faith that is in us, as well as with a loving sympathy for them as brothers.
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.
The legal battle against segregation is won, but the community battle goes on.