318 Quotes About Hospitality

True hospitality is marked by an open response to the dignity of each and every person. Henri Nouwen has described it as receiving the stranger on his own terms, and asserts that it can be offered only by those who 'have found the center of their lives in their own hearts'.

For Jesus the home is not what defines the table; the table is what defines the home.

A steady exposure to distant human need that is beyond our personal response can gradually inoculate us against particular action. . . Isolation from local need, and overexposure to overwhelming but distant need, make our responses to strangers uncertain and tentative at best.We need to find or create contemporary equivalents of the city gate, community rituals, and small group meetings in which we can build preliminary relations with strangers.

f the “Christian right” would acknowledge the existence of a Christian left, the community of believers might be able to deliver a lively witness to the capaciousness of our faith in spirited (and I used that term advisedly) debate.

Perfection is the enemy of done. Wait, forget that, sometimes perfection is the enemy of even starting.

But still – that is our vocation: to convert the hostis into a hospes, the enemy into a guest and to create the free and fearless space where brotherhood and sisterhood can be formed and fully experienced.

Gracious is the giver who can host and also be a stranger at the door.

My hope is that we will treat listening as an act of hospitality, one that opens us to the world, to the people in front of us and to the Lord who knocks at the door.

Extending hospitality to all, even to the most cloddish, truly is the basis of civilization. The fact that the most cloddish, having nothing better to do, always show up and spoil the party for everyone else probably spells civilization's ultimate doom.