“The future starts today, not tomorrow.”
― 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.
It is Jesus who stirs in you the desire to do something great with your lives, the will to follow an ideal, the refusal to allow yourselves to be ground down by mediocrity, the courage to commit yourselves humbly and patiently to improving yourselves and society, making the world more human and more fraternal.”
― Pope John Paul II
“Do not abandon yourselves to despair. We are the Easter people and hallelujah is our song.”
― Pope John Paul II
“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.”
― Pope John Paul II
“Do not be afraid. Do not be satisfied with mediocrity. Put out into the deep and let down your nets for a catch.”
― Pope John Paul II
“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.”
― Pope John Paul II
“I plead with you–never, ever give up on hope, never doubt, never tire, and never become discouraged. Be not afraid.”
― Pope John Paul II
“Know what you are talking about.”
― Pope John Paul II
“A person’s rightful due is to be treated as an object of love, not as an object for use.”
― Pope John Paul II
“Faith and Reason are like two wings of the human spirit by which is soars to the truth.”
― Pope John Paul II
“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.”
― Pope John Paul II
“The worst prison would be a closed heart.”
― Pope John Paul II
“As the family goes, so goes the nation and so goes the whole world in which we live.”
― Pope John Paul II
“Do not be afraid to take a chance on peace, to teach peace, to live peace…Peace will be the last word of history.”
― Pope John Paul II
“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.”
― Pope John Paul II
“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.”
― Pope John Paul II
“Love between man and woman cannot be built without sacrifices and self-denial.”
― Pope John Paul II
“It is the duty of every man to uphold the dignity of every woman.”
― Pope John Paul II
“Ask yourselves, young people, about the love of Christ. Acknowledge His voice resounding in the temple of your heart. Return His bright and penetrating glance which opens the paths of your life to the horizons of the Church’s mission. It is a taxing mission, today more than ever, to teach men the truth about themselves, about their end, their destiny, and to show faithful souls the unspeakable riches of the love of Christ. Do not be afraid of the radicalness of His demands, because Jesus, who loved us first, is prepared to give Himself to you, as well as asking of you. If He asks much of you, it is because He knows you can give much.”
― Pope John Paul II
“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.”
― John Paul II
“Friendship, as has been said, consists in a full commitment of the will to another person with a view to that person’s good.”
― Pope John Paul II
“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.”
― Pope John Paul II
“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.”
― Pope John Paul II
“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.”
― Pope John Paul II
“He was alone in his wonderment,
amoung creatures incapable of wonder
–for them it was enough to exist and go their way.”
― Pope John Paul II
“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.”
― Pope John Paul II
“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.”
― Pope John Paul II
“ 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. ”
― Pope John Paul II
“Merry Christmas!”
― Pope John Paul II
“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.”
― Pope John Paul II
“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.”
― Pope John Paul II
“Learning to think rigorously, so as to act rightly and to serve humanity better.”
― Pope John Paul II
“The ethos of redemption is realied in self-mastery, by means of temperance, that is, continence of desires.”
― Pope John Paul II
“Life is entrusted to man as a treasure which must not be squandered, as a talent which must be used well.”
― Pope John Paul II
“Without wonder, men and women would lapse into deadening routine and little by little would become incapable of a life which is genuinely personal.”
― Pope John Paul II
“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.”
― Pope John Paul II
“The cross means there is no shipwreck without hope; there is no dark without dawn; nor storm without haven.”
― Pope John Paul II
“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.”
― Pope John Paul II
“…all that is carried along
by the stream’s silvery cascade,
rhythmically falling from the mountain,
carried by its own current–
carried where?”
― Pope John Paul II
“…if desire is predominant it can deform love between man and woman and rob them both of it.”
― Pope John Paul II
“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.”
― John Paul II
“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.”
― Pope John Paul II
“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.”
― Pope John Paul II
“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.”
― Pope John Paul II
“Love demands a personal commitment to the will of God.”
― Pope John Paul II
“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.”
― Pope John Paul II
“On one hand the eternal attraction of man towards femininity (cf. Gn. 2:23) frees in him-or perhaps it should free-a gamut of spiritual-corporal desires of an especially personal and “sharing” nature (cf. analysis of the “beginning”), to which a proportionate pyramid of values corresponds. On the other hand, “lust” limits this gamut, obscuring the pyramid of values that marks the perennial attraction of male and female.”
― Pope John Paul II
“Men are like wine-some turn to vinegar, but the best improve with age.”
― Saint Pope John Paul II
“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.”
― Pope John Paul II
“No one else can want for me. No one can substitute his act of will for mine. It does sometimes happen that someone very much wants me to want what he wants. This is the moment when the impassable frontier between him and me, which is drawn by free will, becomes most obvious. I may not want that which he wants me to want – and in this precisely I am incommunicabilis. I am, and I must be, independent in my actions. All human relationships are posited on this fact.”
― John Paul II