Pope john paul ii quotes

“If you follow the will of God, you know that in spite of all the terrible things that happen to you, you will never lose a final refuge. You know that the foundation of the world is love, so that even when no human being can or will help you, you may go on, trusting in the One that loves you.”
&#; Pope Benedict XVI

“Truth is not determined by a majority vote.”
&#; Pope Benedict XVI

“It is theologically and anthropologically important for woman to be at the center of Christianity.

Through Mary, and the other holy women, the feminine element stands at the heart of the Christian religion.”
&#; Pope Benedict XVI

“The world offers you comfort. But you were not made for comfort. You were made for greatness”
&#; Pope Benedict XVI

“We are not some casual and meaningless product of evolution.

Each of us is the result of a thought of God.”
&#; Pope Benedict XVI

“Each of us is the result of a thought of God. Each of us is willed. Each of us is loved. Each of us is necessary.”
&#; Pope Benedict XVI

“To have Christian hope means to know about evil and yet to go to meet the future with confidence.

The core of faith rests upon accepting being loved by God, and therefore to believe is to say Yes, not only to him, but to creation, to creatures, above all, to men, to try to see the image of God in each person and thereby to become a lover. That's not easy, but the basic Yes, the conviction that God has created men, that he stands behind them, that they aren't simply negative, gives love a reference point that enables it to ground hope on the basis of faith.”
&#; Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger/Pope Benedict

“Are we not perhaps all afraid in some way?

If we let Christ enter fully into our lives, if we open ourselves totally to him, are we not afraid that He might take something away from us? Are we not perhaps afraid to give up something significant, something unique, something that makes life so beautiful? Do we not then risk ending up diminished and deprived of our freedom?

. . . No! If we let Christ into our lives, we lose nothing, nothing, absolutely nothing of what makes life free, beautiful and great. No! Only in this friendship are the doors of life opened wide. Only in this friendship is the great potential of human existence truly revealed. Only in this friendship do we experience beauty and liberation.

And so, today, with great strength and great conviction, on the basis of long personal experience of life, I say to you, dear young people: Do not be afraid of Christ!

He takes nothing away, and he gives you everything. When we give ourselves to him, we receive a hundredfold in return. Yes, open, open wide the doors to Christ – and you will find true life. Amen.”
&#; Pope Benedict XVI

“Something I constantly notice is that unembarrassed joy has become rarer.

Joy today is increasingly saddled with moral and ideological burdens, so to speak. When someone rejoices, he is afraid of offending against solidarity with the many people who suffer. I don't have any right to rejoice, people think, in a world where there is so much misery, so much injustice.

I can understand that. There is a moral attitude at work here.

But this attitude is nonetheless wrong. The loss of joy does not make the world better - and, conversely, refusing joy for the sake of suffering does not help those who suffer. The contrary is true. The world needs people who discover the good, who rejoice in it and thereby derive the impetus and courage to do good. Joy, then, does not break with solidarity.

When it is the right kind of joy, when it is not egotistic, when it comes from the perception of the good, then it wants to communicate itself, and it gets passed on. In this connection, it always strikes me that in the poor neighborhoods of, say, South America, one sees many more laughing happy people than among us.

Obviously, despite all their misery, they still have the perception of the good to which they cling and in which they can find encouragement and strength.

In this sense we have a new need for that primordial trust which ultimately only faith can give. That the world is basically good, that God is there and is good. That it is good to live and to be a human being.

This results, then, in the courage to rejoice, which in turn becomes commitment to making sure that other people, too, can rejoice and receive good news.”
&#; Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger/Pope Benedict

“Evil draws its power from indecision and concern for what other people think.”
&#; Pope Benedict XVI

“The fundamental human right, the presupposition of every other right, is the right to life itself.

This is true of life from the moment of conception until its natural end. Abortion, consequently, cannot be a human right -- it is the very opposite.

It is a deep wound in society.”
&#; Pope Benedict XVI

“It is not by sidestepping or fleeing from suffering that we are healed, but rather by our capacity for accepting it, maturing through it and finding meaning through union with Christ, who suffered with infinite love.”
&#; Pope Benedict XVI, Saved in Hope: Spe Salvi

“One who has hope lives differently.”
&#; Pope Benedict XVI

“Seeing with the eyes of Christ, I can give to others much more than their outward necessities; I can give them the look of love which they crave.”
&#; Pope Benedict XVI, God is Love: Deus Caritas Est

“To be sure, it was not Easter Sunday but Holy Saturday, but, the more I reflect on it, the more this seems to be fitting for the nature of our human life: we are still awaiting Easter; we are not yet standing in the full light but walking toward it full of trust.”
&#; Pope Benedict XVI, Milestones: Memoirs: -

“If in my life I fail completely to heed others, solely out of a desire to be 'devout' and to perform my 'religious duties', then my relationship with God will also grow arid.

It becomes merely 'proper', but loveless.”
&#; Pope Benedict XVI (Joseph Ratzinger), God is Love: Deus Caritas Est

“The human person finds his perfection "in seeking and loving what is true and good.”
&#; Joseph Ratzinger

“It is when we attempt to avoid suffering by withdrawing from anything that might involve hurt, when we try to spare ourselves the effort and pain of pursuing truth, love, and goodness, that we drift into a life of emptiness, in which there may be almost no pain, but the dark sensation of meaninglessness and abandonment is all the greater.”
&#; Pope Benedict XVI, Saved in Hope: Spe Salvi

“The great question that will be with us throughout this entire book: What did Jesus actually bring, if not world peace, universal prosperity, and a better world?

What has he brought?

The answer is very simple: God He has brought God, and now we know his face, now we can call upon him. Now we know the path that we human beings have to take in this world. Jesus has brought God and with God the truth about our origin and destiny: faith, hope and love. It is only because of our hardness of heart that we think this is too little.

Yes indeed, God's power works quietly in this world, but it is the true and the lasting power. Again and again, God's cause seems to be in its death throes. Yet over and over again it proves to be the thing that truly endures and saves.”
&#; Pope Benedict XVI (Joseph Ratzinger), Jesus of Nazareth: From the Baptism in the Jordan to the Transfiguration

“My dear young friends, I want to invite you to "dare to love".

Do not desire anything less for your life than a love that is strong and beautiful and that is capable of making the whole of your existence a joyful undertaking of giving yourselves as a gift to God and your brothers and sisters, in imitation of the One who vanquished hatred and death for ever through love (cf. Rev ).

Love is the only force capable of changing the heart of the human person and of all humanity, by making fruitful the relations between men and women, between rich and poor, between cultures and civilizations.

(Message for the 22nd World Youth Day: Palm Sunday, 1 April )”
&#; Pope Benedict XVI

“Dear friends, may no adversity paralyze you. Be afraid neither of the world, nor of the future, nor of your weakness. The Lord has allowed you to live in this moment of history so that, by your faith, his name will continue to resound throughout the world.”
&#; Pope Benedict XVI

“Faith, hope and charity go together.

Hope is practised through the virtue of patience, which continues to do good even in the face of apparent failure, and through the virtue of humility, which accepts God's mystery and trusts him even at times of darkness. Faith tells us that God has given his Son for our sakes and gives us the victorious certainty that it is really true: God is love!

It thus transforms our impatience and our doubts into the sure hope that God holds the world in his hands and that, as the dramatic imagery of the end of the Book of Revelation points out, in spite of all darkness he ultimately triumphs in glory. Faith, which sees the love of God revealed in the pierced heart of Jesus on the Cross, gives rise to love.

Love is the light—and in the end, the only light—that can always illuminate a world grown dim and give us the courage needed to keep living and working. Love is possible, and we are able to practise it because we are created in the image of God. To experience love and in this way to cause the light of God to enter into the world—this is the invitation I would like to extend with the present Encyclical.”
&#; Pope Benedict XVI (Joseph Ratzinger), God is Love: Deus Caritas Est

“Beauty, then, is not mere decoration, but rather an essential element of the liturgical action, since it is an attribute of God himself and his revelation.

These considerations should make us realize the care which is needed, if the liturgical action is to reflect its innate splendour.”
&#; Pope Benedict XVI

“In the course of my intellectual life I experienced very acutely the problem of whether it isn't actually presumptuous to say that we can know the truth - in the face of all our limitations.

I also asked myself to what extent it might not be better to suppress this category. In pursuing this question, however, I was able to observe and also to grasp that relinquishing truth doesn't solve anything but, on the contrary, leads to the tyranny of caprice. In that case, the only thing that can remain is really what we decide on and can replace at will.

Man is degraded if he can't know truth, if everything, in the final analysis, is just the product of an individual or collective decision.

In this way it became clear to me how important it is that we don't lose the concept of truth, in spite of the menaces and perils that it doubtless carries with it.

Biography of pope emeritus benedict xvi quotes on love: Joy , Christ , Catholicism. I can understand that. To experience love and in this way to cause the light of God to enter into the world—this is the invitation I would like to extend with the present Encyclical. People , Persons.

It has to remain as a central category. As a demand on us that doesn't give us rights but requires, on the contrary, our humility and our obedience and can lead us to the common path.”
&#; Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger/Pope Benedict

“Knowing is not simply a material act, since the object that is known always conceals something beyond the empirical datum.

All our knowledge, even the most simple, is always a minor miracle, since it can never be fully explained by the material instruments that we apply to it. In every truth there is something more than we would have expected, in the love that we receive there is always an element that surprises us.”
&#; Pope Benedict XVI, Charity in Truth: Caritas in Veritate

“Mary is a woman who loves.

How could it be otherwise? As a believer who in faith thinks with God's thoughts and wills with God's will, she cannot fail to be a woman who loves. We sense this in her quiet gestures, as recounted by the infancy narratives in the Gospel. We see it in the delicacy with which she recognizes the need of the spouses at Cana and makes it known to Jesus.

We see it in the humility with which she recedes into the background during Jesus' public life, knowing that the Son must establish a new family and that the Mother's hour will come only with the Cross, which will be Jesus' true hour (cf. Jn ; ). When the disciples flee, Mary will remain beneath the Cross (cf.

Jn ); later, at the hour of Pentecost, it will be they who gather around her as they wait for the Holy Spirit (cf. Acts ).”
&#; Pope Benedict XVI, God is Love: Deus Caritas Est

“The State which would provide everything, absorbing everything into itself, would ultimately become a mere bureaucracy incapable of guaranteeing the very thing which the suffering person—every person—needs: namely, loving personal concern.

We do not need a State which regulates and controls everything, but a State which, in accordance with the principle of subsidiarity, generously acknowledges and supports initiatives arising from the different social forces and combines spontaneity with closeness to those in need. The Church is one of those living forces.”
&#; Pope Benedict XVI, God Is Love: Encyclical Letter of Pope Benedict XVI