"God meant for things to be much easier than we have made them"

"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."

"As we come to know the seriousness of the situation, the war, the racism, the poverty in our world, we come to realize that things will not be changed simply by words or demonstrations. Rather, it's a question of living one's life in a drastically different way."

"Love and ever more love is the only solution to every problem that comes up."

"What we would like to do is change the world - make it a little simpler for people to feed, clothe, and shelter themselves as God intended for them to do....We can, to a certain extent, change the world; we can work for the oasis, the little cell of joy and peace in a harried world. We can throw our pebble in the pond and be confident that its ever widening circle will reach around the world. We repeat, there is nothing that we can do but love, and, dear God, please enlarge our hearts to love each other, to love our neighbor, to love our enemy as well as our friend."

"Over and over again, people had to disobey lawful authority to follow the voice of their conscience. This obedience to God and disobedience to the State has, over and over again, happened throughout history. It is time again to cry out against our 'leaders,' to question (since it is not for us to say that they are evil) whether or not they are sane."

"If you feed the poor, you're a saint. If you ask why they're poor, you're a Communist."

"As Dostoevski said: 'Love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared with love in dreams."

"Don't call me a saint. I don't want to be dismissed so easily."

"When it comes down to it, even on the natural plane, it is much happier and more enlivening to love than to be loved."

"How necessary it is to cultivate a spirit of joy. It is a psychological truth that the physical acts of reverence and devotion make one feel devout. The courteous gesture increases one's respect for others. To act lovingly is to begin to feel loving, and certainly to act joyfully brings joy to others which in turn makes one feel joyful. I believe we are called to the duty of delight."

"What we would like to do is change the world...by crying out unceasingly for the rights of the workers, of the poor, of the destitute. We can throw our pebble in the pond and be confident that its ever widening circle will reach around the world."

"Do not give to the poor expecting to get their gratitude so that you can feel good about yourself. If you do, your giving will be thin and short-lived, and that is not what the poor need; it will only improvish them further. Give only if you have something you must give; give only if you are someone for whom giving is its own reward."

"Charity is only as warm as those who administer it."

"We must always aim for the impossible; if we lower our goal, we also diminish our effort."

"The best things to do with the best things in life is to give them away."

"Everything a baptized person does every day should be directly or indirectly related to the Corporal and Spiritual Works of Mercy."

"We cannot love God unless we love each other, and to love we must know each other. We know Him in the breaking of bread, and we know each other in the breaking of bread, and we are not alone anymore. Heaven is a banquet and life is a banquet, too, even with a crust, where there is companionship."

"An individual can march for peace or vote for peace and can have, perhaps, some small influence on global concerns. But the same individual is a giant in the eyes of a child at home. If peace is to be built, it must start with the individual. It is built brick by brick."

"We plant seeds that will flower as results in our lives, so best to remove the weeds of anger, avarice, envy and doubt, that peace and abundance may manifest for all."

"There are two things you should know about the poor: they tend to smell, and they are ungrateful."

"An act of love, a voluntary taking on oneself of some of the pain of the world, increases the courage and love and hope of all."

"No one has a right to sit down and feel hopeless. There is too much work to do."

"The only answer in this life, to the loneliness we are all bound to feel, is community."

"If I have achieved anything in my life, it is because I have not been embarrassed to talk about God."

"Your love for God is only as great as the love you have for the person you love the least."

"For to Ade,...the holy man was the whole mad, the man of integrity, who not only tried to change the world, but to live in it as it was."

"I cannot worry much about your sins and miseries when I have so many of my own. I can only love you all, poor fellow travelers, fellow sufferers. I do not want to add one least straw to the burden you already carry. My prayer from day to day is that God will so enlarge my heart that I will see you all, and live with you all, in His love."

"What I want to bring out is how a pebble cast into a pond causes ripples that spread in all directions. Each one of our thoughts, words, and deeds is like that."

"The vanity of Eve, that desire to exercise power, to seduce, to drag down!"