C. S. Lewis on charity

Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.

Love, while always forgiving of imperfections and mistakes, can never cease to will their removal.

Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another, ‘What! You too? I thought I was the only one!’

Life’s most persistent and urgent question is, ‘What are you doing for others?’

Martin Luther King Jr.1929–1968Conquering Self-centeredness (1957)

Every man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or in the darkness of destructive selfishness.

Martin Luther King Jr.1929–1968Conquering Self-centeredness (1957)

Show me your hands. Do they have scars from giving? Show me your feet. Are they wounded in service? Show me your heart. Have you left a place for divine love?

Fulton J. Sheen1895–1979

• God