Great Throughts Treasury

"You can never expect too much of yourself in the matters of giving yourself to others."

"The dead are living all around us, watching with eager anticipation how we will handle the opportunities they left in our hands when they died."

"City folk need not feel sorry for themselves or be pessimistic about the soil in which Christianity is planted to live and bear fruit. The Christian faith was made for contest, and its best fruits are always produced out of the harsh soil of difficulty and danger."

"The gates of wisdom and truth are forever closed to those who are wise in their own conceits; they have always opened before the expectancy of the humble and the teachable. The great need of the religious soul is the capacity to be receptive. It is a matter of record that no generation of religious people throughout history has ever been lacking in the fellowship and leadership of men and women of rare intellectual power."

"We have got to begin a vast reclamation project to revitalize religion for those to whom it means little or nothing. This can be done not by trying to persuade those outside the church to believe what we believe but by pointing out to them the presence of the unrecognized religion that already exists in their lives."

"I have a lot to be humble about, ... I'd like to say that it's the happiest day of my life, but it isn't: The happiest day of my life was when I was anointed a Catholic priest."

"I would hope [students would know] that No. 1, my door is always open, no matter how difficult a problem that person has that knocks on that door, I will do my best to solve it? I would hope that the students can talk to me about their dreams. They?re very important, their dreams"

"I'm sure I get credit for a lot of things that I'm part of but not necessarily the whole of, we began a great university and those who followed continued the motion forward."

"It didn't matter that there were actually two lakes there, ... It didn't matter that he had only $300 in his pocket. He had the gall, or the zeal, to call it not a school, or a college, but a university."

"I've said Mass in airplanes at 50,000 feet. I've said Mass in the South Pole. I've said Mass in jungles all over the world. I've said Mass in African huts. I've said Mass in cathedrals. Wherever I am, I've been able to do it for over 60 years every day and only miss a couple of times in all those years."

"I go back to an old Latin motto, opus justitiae pax: Peace is the work of justice, we've known 20 percent of the people in the world have 80 percent of the goodies, which means the other 80 percent have to scrape by on 20 percent."

"The best and only traditional authority in the university is intellectual competence? It was great wisdom in the medieval church to have university theologians judged solely by their theological peers in the university."

"The greatest fallout of the space program, ... was not the close-up view of the moon, but a look at spaceship Earth from afar. For the first time in the history of humanity, we were able to see our planet for what it really is."

"The very essence of leadership is [that] you have a vision. It's got to be a vision you articulate clearly and forcefully on every occasion. You can't blow an uncertain trumpet."

"To create, expose, and nurture positive change in the world? to help people around the earth to cross the threshold of consciousness from a limited, local perspective to the inclusive and global view required in a planetary era."