Do not depend on the hope of results. When you are doing the sort of work you have taken on, especially an apostolic work, you may have to meet the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself. And there too a great deal has to be gone through, as gradually you struggle less and less for an idea and more and more for specific people. The range tends to narrow down, but it gets more and more real. In the end, it is the reality of personal relationships that saves everything.
— Thomas Merton, Embracing the World by Jane Vennard