• "Only a life lived for others is a life worth living."

• "The most important motive for study at school, at the university, and in life is the pleasure of working and thereby obtaining results which will serve the community."

• "Teaching should be such that what is offered is perceived as a valuable gift and not as a hard duty ."

• "Never regard study as a duty, but as the enviable opportunity to learn to know the liberating influence of beauty in the realm of the spirit for your own personal joy and to the profit of the community to which your later work belongs."

• "We can do no great things, only small things with great love."

• "The poor are very great people. They can teach us so many beautiful things."

• "Then there was the man we picked up from the drain, half eaten by worms and, after we had brought him to the home, he only said, 'I have lived like an animal in the street, but I am going to die as an angel, loved and cared for.' Then, after we had removed all the worms from his body, all he said, with a big smile, was: 'Sister, I am going home to God', and he died."

• "To us what matters is an individual. Every person is Christ for me. And since there is only one Jesus, that person is the one person in the world at that moment."

• "I feel extraordinarily lucky to have witnessed a bit of her life. She had a presence of great strength, enormous focus and love. I don't think Mother Teresa even noticed me when I was there. She's not the kind of person who had an awareness of doing things for a photographer. She had a sole focus and a powerful mission in life. She created a community of women to care for the people she loved most, the poor and the sick. These people she cared for were just terribly ill but they adored her, they called her mother. She wanted them to get better, to go out and have their own lives."
  --Mary Ellen Mark, September 5, 1997

• "We must be the change we wish to see."

• "Knowledge includes all training that is useful for the service of mankind…"

• "If we want to impart education best suited to the needs of the villagers, we should convert it into a training school in order that we might be able to give practical training to teachers in the needs of the villages."

• "The basic education is meant to transform village children into model villagers. It is principally designed for them. The inspiration for it has come from the village

• "Example is not the main thing in influencing others. It is the only thing."

• "The only ones among you who will be really happy are those who will have sought and found how to serve."

• "In everyone's life, at some time, our inner fire goes out. It is then burst into flame by an encounter with another human being. We should all be thankful for those people who rekindle the inner spirit."

• "I don't know what your destiny will be, but one thing I do know: the only ones among you who will be really happy are those who have sought and found how to serve."

• "As soon as man does not take his existence for granted, but beholds it as something unfathomably mysterious, thought begins."

• "Grow into your ideals so that life cannot rob you of them.

Wilbur Fisk,

President Inaugural Address, 1832 Wesleyan University