When we love and respect people, revealing to them their value, they can begin to come out from behind the walls that protect them.

A community is only a community when the majority of its members are making the transition from 'the community for myself' to 'myself for the community'.

If we are to grow in love, the prisons of our egoism must be unlocked. This implies suffering, constant effort and repeated choices.

A community which refuses to welcome - whether through fear, weariness, insecurity, a desire to cling to comfort, or just because it is fed up with visitors - is dying spiritually.

Many people are good at talking about what they are doing, but in fact do little. Others do a lot but don't talk about it; they are the ones who make a community live.

To be lonely is to feel unwanted and unloved, and therefor unloveable. Loneliness is a taste of death. No wonder some people who are desperately lonely lose themselves in mental illness or violence to forget the inner pain.

Machines help us do things more quickly and efficiently, but they can also destroy some community activities. Machines can also throw the weakest people out of work and this would be sad, because their small contribution to the housework or cooking is their way of giving something to the community. People who are capable of doing things very quickly with the help of machines become tremendously busy, always active, in charge of everyone - a bit like machines themselves.