People need someone to stir their compassion often, to make their tears flow, and to give their souls the supreme benefit of generous feelings. For through the wonderful compensation of nature they who give of themselves, grow; and they who withdraw into themselves, living for small pleasures and afraid to share them with others, thinking only of greedily satisfying their own appetites, will gradually change from a human into pure solitude, carrying in their hearts all the gray hair of wintertime.

Source: “Wandering Teachers” published in La America, May 1894.

“In those days,” Martin Luther King Jr. writes, “the church was not merely a thermometer that recorded the ideas and principles of popular opinion.”