The highest form of worship is the worship of unselfish Christian service. The greatest form of praise is the sound of consecrated feet seeking out the lost and helpless.

To live a pure unselfish life, one must count nothing as one’s own in the midst of abundance.

I feel like if you’re a really good human being, you can try to find something beautiful in every single person, no matter what.

It’s hard to practice compassion when we’re struggling with our authenticity or when our own worthiness is off-balance.

The poor don’t know that their function in life is to exercise our generosity.

Do not do unto others as you expect they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same.

He that does good to another does good also to himself.

A faithful woman can become a devoted daughter of God – more concerned with being righteous than with being selfish, more anxious to exercise compassion than to exercise dominion, more committed to integrity than to notoriety. And she knows of her own infinite worth.

Especially when you’re at a high level in an organization, criticism can be devastating to an employee. I prefer to praise employees for what they’re doing right, and it tends to lead to them doing more of the same. Not always, but it’s the way I choose to bet.

The year 2100 will see eugenics universally established. In past ages, the law governing the survival of the fittest roughly weeded out the less desirable strains. Then man’s new sense of pity began to interfere with the ruthless workings of nature. As a result, we continue to keep alive and to breed the unfit.

Animals are my friends… and I don’t eat my friends.

Never elated when someone’s oppressed, never dejected when another one’s blessed.

Like every parent, when you start your family, your life completely changes. And you completely live for someone else. I find that the most extraordinary thing. Your life is handed over to someone else. From that moment on, they come first in every choice you make. It’s the most wonderful thing.

Our task must be to free ourselves by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature and its beauty.

Love begins by taking care of the closest ones – the ones at home.

Everyone likes flattery; and when you come to Royalty you should lay it on with a trowel.

Great teachers emanate out of knowledge, passion and compassion.

The chief ingredients in the composition of those qualities that gain esteem and praise, are good nature, truth, good sense, and good breeding.

I will praise any man that will praise me.

One man cannot hold another man down in the ditch without remaining down in the ditch with him.

Wherever a man turns he can find someone who needs him.

I am for doing good to the poor, but I differ in opinion about the means. I think the best way of doing good to the poor is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it.

A man who was completely innocent, offered himself as a sacrifice for the good of others, including his enemies, and became the ransom of the world. It was a perfect act.

Love is the ability and willingness to allow those that you care for to be what they choose for themselves without any insistence that they satisfy you.

You know that your happiness and suffering depend on the happiness and suffering of others. That insight helps you not to do wrong things that will bring suffering to yourself and to other people.

If you’re in trouble, or hurt or need – go to the poor people. They’re the only ones that’ll help – the only ones.

A leader is best when people barely know he exists, when his work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will say: we did it ourselves.

Today, more than ever before, life must be characterized by a sense of Universal responsibility, not only nation to nation and human to human, but also human to other forms of life.

A gentleman is one who puts more into the world than he takes out.

I’d rather give my life than be afraid to give it.

Give to everyone who begs from you; and of him who takes away your goods do not ask them again. And as you wish that men would do to you, do so to them.

What we have found in this country, and maybe we’re more aware of it now, is one problem that we’ve had, even in the best of times, and that is the people who are sleeping on the grates, the homeless, you might say, by choice.

The happiest people I know as a nation are the Burmese; their brightness and cheeriness are proverbial. Kindness to animals is one of their greatest ‚weaknesses‘; no Burmese will kill an animal, even if it is to put it out of pain.

A person places themselves on a level with the ones they praise.

You must live for another if you wish to live for yourself.

The Christian missionary may preach the gospel to the poor naked heathen, but the spiritual heathen who populate Europe have as yet heard nothing of Christianity.

Let us touch the dying, the poor, the lonely and the unwanted according to the graces we have received and let us not be ashamed or slow to do the humble work.

Rose Adams is a wonderful Christian woman who cared for my mother, Morrow Coffey Graham, in her last years of life.

What is the appropriate behavior for a man or a woman in the midst of this world, where each person is clinging to his piece of debris? What’s the proper salutation between people as they pass each other in this flood?

My entire childhood was steeped in poverty. For me, poverty, in a way, was the first inspiration of my life, a commitment to do something for the poor.

I’m generous. I give good tips. It’s just – the way I live my life, ironically enough, is: I don’t want anything. I’m not a consumer. I don’t crave objects.

A bone to the dog is not charity. Charity is the bone shared with the dog, when you are just as hungry as the dog.

You may be rich, but there is one thing you can’t afford – that is, if you are a good sort – you can’t afford to spend money on your own luxuries while there are people around you wanting the necessaries of life.

As we enjoy great advantages from the inventions of others, we should be glad of an opportunity to serve others by any invention of ours, and this we should do freely and generously.

I have just three things to teach: simplicity, patience, compassion. These three are your greatest treasures.

It is a very rare man who does not victimize the helpless.

Praise, like gold and diamonds, owes its value only to its scarcity.

I’ve 20,000 hours of clinical practice; you’re not naive after the first few thousand. I’ve helped people deal with things that most people can’t imagine.

Moral authority is never retained by any attempt to hold on to it. It comes without seeking and is retained without effort.

There are people who can do all fine and heroic things but one – keep from telling their happiness to the unhappy.

All these walls that keep us from loving each other as one family or one race – racism, religion, where we grew up, whatever, class, socioeconomic – what makes us be so selfish and prideful, what keeps us from wanting to help the next man, what makes us be so focused on a personal legacy as opposed to the entire legacy of a race.

We can continue to learn generation after generation and now is time to begin to learn how to love in a non-discriminatory way because we are intelligent enough, but we are not loving enough as a species.

Tears shed for self are tears of weakness, but tears shed for others are a sign of strength.

A man is truly ethical only when he obeys the compulsion to help all life which he is able to assist, and shrinks from injuring anything that lives.

It’s amazing if you just listen to people. They tell you all the time things that you can do for them, without even realizing what they’re doing. I’ve learned to take notice of those things and if it’s something that I feel God wants me to do, then I try to do that to add joy to their life.

Love means to love that which is unlovable; or it is no virtue at all.

Men do not accept their prophets and slay them, but they love their martyrs and worship those whom they have tortured to death.

The totalitarian world produces backwardness because it does such violence to the spirit, thwarting the human impulse to create, to enjoy, to worship.

He who is cruel to animals becomes hard also in his dealings with men. We can judge the heart of a man by his treatment of animals.

So the bodhisattva saves all beings, not by preaching sermons to them, but by showing them that they are delivered, they are liberated, by the act of not being able to stop changing.

I spent years studying the teachings of Patanjali, and he reminded us several thousand years ago that when we are steadfast – which means that we never slip in our abstention of thoughts of harm directed toward others – then all living creatures cease to feel enmity in our presence.