Quotes About Service

I am the window-cleaner, here to cause the cleansing pain.

Is it natural to sever low beings from their true and rightful destinies? From their natural-born purpose? To give them a false sense of agency? As if some creatures are not put here in the service of others. As if cows don't exist to be eaten." He turned his glass in his hands. "Nothing is accidental in the works of nature. Do you know who said that? Aristotle. He said, Nothing is accidental, everything is, absolutely, for the sake of something else.

Understanding that he relies on all that surrounds him, a knight is kind above all.

Thinking that we have to always burn our candle at both ends in order to benefit others is perhaps the greatest idiot compassion of all.

We learn the inner secret of happiness when we learn to direct our inner drives, our interest and our attention to something besides ourselves.

We learn the inner secret of happiness when we learn to direct our inner drives, our interest and our attention to something outside ourselves.

Oh, Lord, let me feel at one with myself. Let me perform a thousand daily tasks with love, but let every one spring from a greater central core of devotion and love.

Doc kept at his work. In a quiet, calm voice he told me to get a battle dressing out of his pouch and press it firmly against his face to stop the bleeding while he finished work on the wounded arm. Such was the selfless dedication of the navy hospital corpsmen who served in Marine infantry units.

As I looked at the stains on the coral, I recalled some of the eloquent phrases of politicians and newsmen about how "gallant" it is for a man to "shed his blood for his country

Your soul may belong to Jesus, but your ass belongs to the marines.

I know God has been found by unusual people in unusual places--in a sudden vision in a grove or orchard or grotto, or on a mountain or in a closet, or through saintly service to African lepers or to Calcutta untouchables. But for most of us, most of the time, I am convinced he can be found most surely in 'the natural sequence to the performance' of the duties he has given us that all of us (not just the unusual) can perform in our own homes and neighborhoods.

Never walk away from someone who deserves help; your hand is God's hand for that person.

The church is the primary arena in which we learn that glory does not consist in what we do for God but in what God does for us.

Eugene H. Peterson

If your first concern is to look after yourself, you'll never find yourself.

Individualism is the growth-stunting, maturity-inhibiting habit of understanding growth as an isolated self-project. Individualism is self-ism with a swagger. The individualist is the person who is convinced that he or she can serve God without dealing with God.

The pastoral itch to be where "the action is" should be resisted.

And my work is not to fix people. It is to lead people in the worship of God and to lead them in living a holy

Living together means seeing the oil flow over the head, down the face, through the beard, onto the shoulders of the other—and when I see that I know that my brother, my sister, is my priest.

He creates each of us by Christ Jesus to join him in the work he does, the good work he has gotten ready for us to do, work we had better be doing.

Let me give you a new command: Love one another. In the same way I loved you, you love one another. This is how everyone will recognize that you are my disciples — when they see the love you have for each other.

God did not become a servant so that we could order him around but so that we could join him in a redemptive life.

The Christian is a person who recognizes that our real problem is not in achieving freedom but in learning service under a better master. The Christian realizes that every relationship that excludes God becomes oppressive.

Those who parade the rhetoric of liberation but scorn the wisdom of service do not lead people into the glorious liberty of the children of God but into a cramped and covetous squalor.