Hospitality invites to prayer before it checks credentials, welcomes to the table before administering the entrance exam.
— Patrick Henry in The Ironic Christian's Companion

A good guest is an example of owning less (not even what is yours is truly yours) and thus having more.
— Nilton Bonder in The Kabbalah of Money

Many years ago, a traveler came to a small town. The custom at those times was to open your door to whoever comes as "God's guests," as they were called. When someone knocked on your door and said "I am God's guest," you were to invite him in, feed him, and give him a place to sleep.
— Sheikh Ragip Frager in Love Is the Wine

How should one live? Welcoming to all.
— Mechtild of Magdeburg quoted in Open Mind by Diane Mariechild

Hospitality is the virtue which allows us to break through the narrowness of our own fears and to open our houses to the stranger, with the intuition that salvation comes to us in the form of a tired traveler. Hospitality makes anxious disciples into powerful witnesses, makes suspicious owners into generous givers, and makes close-minded sectarians into interested recipients of new ideas and insights.
— Henri J. M. Nouwen in Ministry and Spirituality

It is meant to offer an experience of hospitality, just as I believe that God extends to human beings a divine and inexhaustible welcome: the door is always open, the table always set, the arms flung wide, outstretched.
— Jane Redmont in When in Doubt, Sing

What do I mean "open to God"? I mean... a courageous and confident hospitality expressed in all directions.... I mean an openness which is in the deepest sense a creative and dynamic receptivity — the ability to receive, to accept, to become.
— Samuel H. Miller in Man the Believer

The German word for hospitality is Gastfreundschft which means friendship for the guest.... It means the creation of a free space where the stranger can enter and become a friend instead of an enemy.
— Henri J. M. Nouwen

Let us welcome whatever comes our way — a dying friend, a reclusive spider, a jewel-encrusted icon, the apothegms of Christ — and find in these gifts the beauty of all created things and of our God, who breathes them into being and upholds them through love.
— Philip Zaleski in The Recollected Heart

Many years ago, a traveler came to a small town. The custom at those times was to open your door to whoever comes as "God's guests," as they were called. When someone knocked on your door and said "I am God's guest," you were to invite him in, feed him, and give him a place to sleep.
— Sheikh Ragip Frager, editor in Love Is the Wine