Hospitality Quotes

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

~ Benjamin Aubrey Myers

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

~ Leonard Sweet

As a way of life, an act of love, an expression of faith, our hospitality reflects and anticipates God's welcome. Simultaneously costly and wonderfully rewarding, hospitality often involves small deaths and little resurrections. By God's grace we can grow more willing, more eager, to open the door to a needy neighbor, a weary sister or brother, a stranger in distress. Perhaps as we open that door more regularly, we will grow increasingly sensitive to the quiet knock of angels. In the midst of a life-giving practice, we too might catch glimpses of Jesus who asks for our welcome and welcomes us home.

~ Christine Pohl

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.

~ Christine Pohl

To listen is very hard, because it asks of us so much interior stability that we no longer need to prove ourselves by speeches, arguments, statements, or declarations. True listeners no longer have an inner need to make their presence known. They are free to receive, to welcome, to accept.Listening is much more than allowing another to talk while waiting for a chance to respond. Listening is paying full attention to others and welcoming them into our very beings. The beauty of listening is that, those who are listened to start feeling accepted, start taking their words more seriously and discovering their own true selves. Listening is a form of spiritual hospitality by which you invite strangers to become friends, to get to know their inner selves more fully, and even to dare to be silent with you.

~ Henri J.m. Nouwen

His abhorrence and fear of alcohol did not extend to his power as host. He kept a huge cupboard of drinks in the station house and loved to serve large measures to visiting relatives--especially those he disliked--about which there was a definite element of spreading bait for garden snails.

~ John Mcgahern

At least you've brought gifts. What's in the basket?She rummaged through the contents. A few sweetmeats and lozenges. Packets of raisins. But mostly it's Aunt Thea's surplus cosmetics and remedies. She sends away for every product advertised in every ladies' magazine. I like to see them put to some use.He blinked at her. These are your gifts?Your men have depleted our stores of food, and I didn't have time to prepare anything else.What are they supposed to do with- he held up a brown bottle and peered at the label- Dr. Jacobs' Miracle Elixir? He plucked a small jar out next. Excelsior Blemish Cream?Women are women, Logan. Every girl needs a bit of luxury and a chance to feel pretty now and then.

~ Tessa Dare

There is nothing that makes me happier than sitting around the dinner table and talking until the candles are burned down.

~ Madeleine L'engle

In Paris the cashiers sit rather than stand. They run your goods over a scanner, tally up the price, and then ask you for exact change. The story they give is that there aren't enough euros to go around. The entire EU is short on coins.And I say, Really? because there are plenty of them in Germany. I'm never asked for exact change in Spain or Holland or Italy, so I think the real problem lies with the Parisian cashiers, who are, in a word, lazy. Here in Tokyo they're not just hard working but almost violently cheerful. Down at the Peacock, the change flows like tap water. The women behind the registers bow to you, and I don't mean that they lower their heads a little, the way you might if passing someone on the street. These cashiers press their hands together and bend from the waist. Then they say what sounds to me like We, the people of this store, worship you as we might a god.

~ David Sedaris

When hospitality becomes an art it loses its very soul.

~ Max Beerbohm