The biggest mistake sometimes is to play things very safe in this life and end up being moral failures.

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.

Think what the world could look like if we took care of the poor even half as well as we do our Bibles!

Whatever I had read as a child about the saints had thrilled me. I could see the nobility of giving one's life for the sick, the maimed, the leper. But there was another question in my mind. Why was so much done in remedying the evil instead of avoiding it in the first place? Where were the saints to try to change the social order, not just to minister to the slaves, but to do away with slavery?

Dear God, please enlarge our hearts to love each other, to love our neighbor, to love our enemy as well as our friend.

The Communists in Cuba didn't assist Castro in his revolution. They weren't on the side of the students. They didn't do anything to help in the invasion or the long-continuing struggle from the Oriente province down.

Love casts out fear, but we have to get over the fear in order to get close enough to love them.