Desmond Tutu

But God can only smile because only God can know what is coming next.

In my country of South Africa, we struggled for years against the evil system of apartheid that divided human beings, children of the same God, by racial classification and then denied many of them fundamental human rights.

Forgiveness says you are given another chance to make a new beginning.

Isn't it amazing that we are all made in God's image, and yet there is so much diversity among his people?

If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality.

God's love is too great to be confined to any one side of a conflict or to any one religion.

When the missionaries came to Africa they had the Bible and we had the land. They said 'Let us pray.' We closed our eyes. When we opened them we had the Bible and they had the land.

The God who existed before any religion counts on you to make the oneness of the human family known and celebrated.

God's dream is that you and I and all of us will realize that we are family, that we are made for togetherness, for goodness, and for compassion.

You don't choose your family. They are God's gift to you, as you are to them.

I am a leader by default, only because nature does not allow a vacuum.

When we see the face of a child, we think of the future. We think of their dreams about what they might become, and what they might accomplish.

Do your little bit of good where you are it's those little bits of good put together that overwhelm the world.

Your ordinary acts of love and hope point to the extraordinary promise that every human life is of inestimable value.

Hope is being able to see that there is light despite all of the darkness.

It may be a procession of faithful failures that enriches the soil of godly success. Faithful actions are not religious acts. They are not even necessary actions undertaken by people of faith. Faithful actions, whether they are marked by success or they end in failure, are actions that are compelled by goodness.

Out of the cacophony of random suffering and chaos that can mark human life, the life artist sees or creates a symphony of meaning and order. A life of wholeness does not depend on what we experience. Wholeness depends on how we experience our lives.

Though wrong gratifies in the moment, good yields its gifts over a lifetime.