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 shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad.

Oh, the difference between nearly right and exactly right.

T stands for being nice. T stands for manners. T stands for being polite.

So let’s be honest with ourselves and not take ourselves too serious, and never condemn the other fellow for doing what we are doing every day, only in a different way.

Gays are some of the nicest, kindest, most loving people in the world.

Generous people can become more generous as they become richer, giving away vast fortunes to worthwhile causes as Bill Gates and Warren Buffett are doing.

You cannot do a kindness too soon, for you never know how soon it will be too late.

We awaken in others the same attitude of mind we hold toward them.

I have decided to stick with love. Hate is too great a burden to bear.

Friendship often ends in love, but love in friendship – never.

Hell is yourself and the only redemption is when a person puts himself aside to feel deeply for another person.

U2 was involved in Live Aid, and I ended up going to Ethiopia and working there for some time with my wife, Ali.

A squirrel dying in front of your house may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa.

Ethiopia didn’t just blow my mind; it opened my mind. Anyway, on our last day at this orphanage a man handed me his baby and said, ‚Would you take my son with you?‘ He knew, in Ireland, that his son would live, and that in Ethiopia, his son would die.

I have a dogmatic certainty: God is in every person’s life. God is in everyone’s life. Even if the life of a person has been a disaster, even if it is destroyed by vices, drugs or anything else – God is in this person’s life. You can – you must – try to seek God in every human life.

Men should be either treated generously or destroyed, because they take revenge for slight injuries – for heavy ones they cannot.

I’ve been to those places where it’s ‚poor, pitiful me.‘

Speak the truth, do not yield to anger; give, if thou art asked for little; by these three steps thou wilt go near the gods.

Any religion that professes to be concerned about the souls of men and is not concerned about the slums that damn them, the economic conditions that strangle them and the social conditions that cripple them is a spiritually moribund religion awaiting burial.

One likes people much better when they’re battered down by a prodigious siege of misfortune than when they triumph.

As you grow older, you will discover that you have two hands, one for helping yourself, the other for helping others.

God has given us two hands – one to receive with and the other to give with. We are not cisterns made for hoarding; we are channels made for sharing.

Men feel that cruelty to the poor is a kind of cruelty to animals. They never feel that it is an injustice to equals; nay it is treachery to comrades.

Let us sacrifice our today so that our children can have a better tomorrow.

Our plans miscarry because they have no aim. When a man does not know what harbor he is making for, no wind is the right wind.

You can see neurosis from below – as a sickness – as most psychiatrists see it. Or you can understand it as a compassionate man might: respecting the neurosis as a fumbling and inefficient effort toward good ends.

Life’s like a play: it’s not the length, but the excellence of the acting that matters.

I am the most helpful and open up doors for everyone and I like to share.

People who identify themselves as conservatives donate money to charity more often than people who identify themselves as liberals. They donate more money and a higher percentage of their incomes.

A man is ethical only when life, as such, is sacred to him, that of plants and animals as that of his fellow men, and when he devotes himself helpfully to all life that is in need of help.

Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.

There is nothing we like to communicate to others as much as the seal of secrecy together with what lies under it.

Still and all, why bother? Here’s my answer. Many people need desperately to receive this message: I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people do not care about them. You are not alone.

That service is the noblest which is rendered for its own sake.

An unimaginative person can neither be reverent or kind.

He who loves 50 people has 50 woes; he who loves no one has no woes.

I am sometimes sad when I hear the personal stories of Tibetan refugees who have been tortured or beaten. Some irritation, some anger comes. But it never lasts long. I always try to think at a deeper level, to find ways to console.

Never let your zeal outrun your charity. The former is but human, the latter is divine.

My problem is I am Christian, so I think other people must have success, too; it’s not about me.

My mother told me, ‚Son, nobody else but God knows.‘ And that’s what I’m about – reaching out to the people, crying with them, giving them hope. Visiting the hospital, visiting the kids with cancer, visiting the adults, and stuff like that. That’s what I do.

Technology is unlocking the innate compassion we have for our fellow human beings.

My father wasn’t around when I was a kid, and I used to always say, ‚Why me? Why don’t I have a father? Why isn’t he around? Why did he leave my mother?‘ But as I got older I looked deeper and thought, ‚I don’t know what my father was going through, but if he was around all the time, would I be who I am today?‘

Heroes are not known by the loftiness of their carriage; the greatest braggarts are generally the merest cowards.

It’s not about changing people; it’s sometimes about changing a situation. How can we build an even better situation for them?

Being unwanted, unloved, uncared for, forgotten by everybody, I think that is a much greater hunger, a much greater poverty than the person who has nothing to eat.

The only way to have a friend is to be one.

When the people become involved in their government, government becomes more accountable, and our society is stronger, more compassionate, and better prepared for the challenges of the future.

When we’re looking for compassion, we need someone who is deeply rooted, is able to bend and, most of all, embraces us for our strengths and struggles.

To give pleasure to a single heart by a single act is better than a thousand heads bowing in prayer.

My mom was on the United Way group that decides how to allocate the money and looks at all the different charities and makes the very hard decisions about where that pool of funds is going to go.

I said I was ‚The Greatest,‘ I never said I was the smartest!

The good man is the friend of all living things.

Until he extends his circle of compassion to include all living things, man will not himself find peace.

Social Security is based on a principle. It’s based on the principle that you care about other people. You care whether the widow across town, a disabled widow, is going to be able to have food to eat.

Forgive me my nonsense, as I also forgive the nonsense of those that think they talk sense.

Perhaps travel cannot prevent bigotry, but by demonstrating that all peoples cry, laugh, eat, worry, and die, it can introduce the idea that if we try and understand each other, we may even become friends.

I have done for my country, and for all mankind, all that I could do, and I now resign my soul, without fear, to my God – my daughter to my country.

To use the same words is not a sufficient guarantee of understanding; one must use the same words for the same genus of inward experience; ultimately one must have one’s experiences in common.

You must not lose faith in humanity. Humanity is an ocean; if a few drops of the ocean are dirty, the ocean does not become dirty.

One of the things I’ve never been accused of is not caring about people.