Pope John Paul II was born (18 May 1920 – 2 April 2005) was the head of the Catholic Church and sovereign of the Vatican City State from 1978 until his death in April 2005.
Quotes By Pope John Paul II
- It is Jesus that you seek when you dream of happiness; He is waiting for you when nothing else you find satisfies you; He is the beauty to which you are so attracted; it is He who provoked you with that thirst for fullness that will not let you settle for compromise; it is He who urges you to shed the masks of a false life; it is He who reads in your heart your most genuine choices, the choices that others try to stifle.
- Do not abandon yourselves to despair. We are the Easter people and hallelujah is our song.
- Artistic talent is a gift from God and whoever discovers it in himself has a certain obligation: to know that he cannot waste this talent, but must develop it.
- The earth will not continue to offer its harvest, except with faithful stewardship. We cannot say we love the land and then take steps to destroy it for use by future generations.
- Do not be afraid. Do not be satisfied with mediocrity. Put out into the deep and let down your nets for a catch.
- I plead with you–never, ever give up on hope, never doubt, never tire, and never become discouraged. Be not afraid.
- Know what you are talking about.
- A person’s rightful due is to be treated as an object of love, not as an object for use.
- Faith and Reason are like two wings of the human spirit by which is soars to the truth.
- True freedom is not advanced in the permissive society, which confuses freedom with license to do anything whatever and which in the name of freedom proclaims a kind of general amorality. It is a caricature of freedom to claim that people are free to organize their lives with no reference to moral values, and to say that society does not have to ensure the protection and advancement of ethical values. Such an attitude is destructive of freedom and peace.
- The worst prison would be a closed heart.
- As the family goes, so goes the nation and so goes the whole world in which we live.
- Do not be afraid to take a chance on peace, to teach peace, to live peace…Peace will be the last word of history.
- There is no dignity when the human dimension is eliminated from the person. In short, the problem with pornography is not that it shows too much of the person, but that it shows far too little.
- Have no fear of moving into the unknown. Simply step out fearlessly knowing that I am with you, therefore no harm can befall you; all is very, very well. Do this in complete faith and confidence.
- It is the duty of every man to uphold the dignity of every woman.
- Love between man and woman cannot be built without sacrifices and self-denial.
- Love consists of a commitment which limits one’s freedom – it is a giving of the self, and to give oneself means just that: to limit one’s freedom on behalf of another.
- Not all are called to be artists in the specific sense of the term. Yet, as Genesis has it, all men and women are entrusted with the task of crafting their own life: in a certain sense, they are to make of it a work of art, a masterpiece.
- Friendship, as has been said, consists in a full commitment of the will to another person with a view to that person’s good.
- We are not the sum of our weaknesses and failures, we are the sum of the Father’s love for us and our real capacity to become the image of His Son Jesus.
- The Gospel lives in conversation with culture, and if the Church holds back from the culture, the Gospel itself falls silent. Therefore, we must be fearless in crossing the threshold of the communication and information revolution now taking place.
- Take away from love the fullness of self surrender, the completeness of personal commitment, and what remains will be a total denial and negation of it.
- Limitation of one’s freedom might seem to be something negative and unpleasant, but love makes it a positive, joyful and creative thing. Freedom exists for the sake of love.
- Faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth; and God has placed in the human heart a desire to know the truth- in a word, to know himself- so that, by knowing and loving God, men and women may also come to the fullness of truth about themselves.
- This is no time to be ashamed of the Gospel. It is the time to preach it from the rooftops. Do not be afraid to break out of comfortable and routine modes of living in order to take up the challenge of making Christ known in the modern metropolis.
- Humanity should question itself, once more, about the absurd and always unfair phenomenon of war, on whose stage of death and pain only remains standing the negotiating table that could and should have prevented it.
- Learning to think rigorously, so as to act rightly and to serve humanity better.
- Life is entrusted to man as a treasure which must not be squandered, as a talent which must be used well.
- The ethos of redemption is realied in self-mastery, by means of temperance, that is, continence of desires.
- Without wonder, men and women would lapse into deadening routine and little by little would become incapable of a life which is genuinely personal.
- The battle against the devil, which is the principal task of Saint Michael the Archangel, is still being fought today, because the devil is still alive and active in the world.
- The cross means there is no shipwreck without hope; there is no dark without dawn; nor storm without haven.
- Treating a person as a means to an end, and an end moreover which in this case is pleasure, the maximization of pleasure, will always stand in the way of love.
- Marriage is an act of will that signifies and involves a mutual gift, which unites the spouses and binds them to their eventual souls, with whom they make up a sole family – a domestic church.
- Love demands a personal commitment to the will of God.
- In suffocating the voice of conscience, passion carries with itself a restlessness of the body and the senses: it is the restlessness of the “external man.” When the internal man has been reduced to silence, then passion, once it has been given freedom of action, so to speak, exhibits itself as an insistent tendency to satisfy the senses and the body.
- The true Christian can nurture a trustful optimism, because he is certain of not walking alone. In sending us Jesus, the eternal Son made man, God has drawn near to each of us. In Christ he has become our travelling companion.
- The lust of the flesh directs these desires [of personal union], however, to satisfaction of the body, often at the cost of a real and full communion of persons.
- Original sin is not only the violation of a positive command … but … attempts … to abolish fatherhood, destroying its rays which permeate the created world, placing in doubt the truth about God who is Love and leaving man with only a sense of the master-slave relationship.
- Freedom consists not in doing what we like, but in having the right to do what we ought.
- None can sense more deeply than you artists, ingenious creators of beauty that you are, something of the pathos with which God at the dawn of creation looked upon the work of his hands.
- Men are like wine-some turn to vinegar, but the best improve with age.
- A person is an entity of a sort to which the only proper and adequate way to relate is love.
- Faced with today’s problems and disappointments, many people will try to escape from their responsibility. Escape in selfishness, escape in sexual pleasure, escape in drugs, escape in violence, escape in indifference and cynical attitudes. I propose to you the option of love, which is the opposite of escape.
- Love is never something ready made, something merely ‘given’ to man and woman, it is always at the same time a ‘task’ which they are set. Love should be seen as something which in a sense never ‘is’ but is always only ‘becoming’, and what it becomes depends up on the contribution of both persons and the depth of their commitment.
- Have no fear of moving into the unknown. Simply step out fearlessly knowing that I am with you.
- What is the difference between “creator” and “craftsman”? The one who creates bestows being itself, he brings something out of nothing—ex nihilo sui et subiecti, as the Latin puts it—and this, in the strict sense, is a mode of operation which belongs to the Almighty alone. The craftsman, by contrast, uses something that already exists, to which he gives form and meaning.
- God allows man to learn His supernatural ends, but the decision to strive towards an end, the choice of course, is left to man’s free will. God does not redeem man against his will.
- A democracy without values easily turns into open or thinly disguised totalitarianism.
- Truth can prevail only in virtue of truth itself.
- Faced with the sacredness of life and of the human person, and before the marvels of the universe, wonder is the only appropriate attitude.
- Do not be afraid, then, when love makes demands. Do not be afraid when love requires sacrifice.
- Social justice cannot be attained by violence. Violence kills what it intends to create.
- There is no need to be dismayed if love sometimes follows torturous ways.
- The capacity to love is determined by the fact that man is ready to seek the good consciously with others, to subordinate himself to this good because of others, or to subordinate himself to others because of this good.
- It is not enough to long for a person as a good for oneself, one must also, and above all, long for that person’s good.
- It is unbecoming for a cardinal to ski badly.
- Prayer finds its source in God’s holiness and it is at the same time our response to this holiness.
- When freedom does not have a purpose, when it does not wish to know anything about the rule of law engraved in the hearts of men and women, when it does not listen to the voice of conscience, it turns against humanity and society.
- Prayer finds its source in God’s holiness and it is at the same time our response to this holiness.
- The great danger for family life, in the midst of any society whose idols are pleasure, comfort and independence, lies in the fact that people close their hearts and become selfish.
- Faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth; and God has placed in the human heart a desire to know the truth—in a word, to know himself—so that, by knowing and loving God, men and women may also come to the fullness of truth about themselves.
- In truth, a State whose society is not sovereign is no sovereign State at all. Such is the case when a society has no chance to decide the common good, and when it has been denied the basic right to share in power and responsibility.
- Self-control is not needed because the body is evil—the truth is just the opposite. The body should be controlled with honor because it is worthy of honor.
- Chastity by no means signifies rejection of human sexuality or lack of esteem for it: rather it signifies spiritual energy capable of defending love from the perils of selfishness and aggressiveness, and able to advance it towards its full realization.
- Christ is the sacrament of the invisible God – a sacrament that indicates presence. God is with us.
- Only the chaste man and the chaste woman are capable of true love.
