“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 “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 “Know what you are talking about.” ― Pope John Paul II “Do not abandon yourselves to despair. We are the Easter people and hallelujah is our song.” ― 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 “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 “The worst prison would be a closed heart.” ― 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, Pope John Paul II: In My Own Words “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
“When the late Pope John Paul II decided to place the woman so strangely known as “Mother” Teresa on the fast track for beatification, and thus to qualify her for eventual sainthood, the Vatican felt obliged to solicit my testimony and I thus spent several hours in a closed hearing room with a priest, a deacon, and a monsignor, no doubt making their day as I told off, as from a rosary, the frightful faults and crimes of the departed fanatic. In the course of this, I discovered that the pope during his tenure had surreptitiously abolished the famous office of “Devil’s Advocate,” in order to fasttrack still more of his many candidates for canonization. I can thus claim to be the only living person to have represented the Devil pro bono.” ― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch-22: A Memoir “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 radical ness 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, The Meaning of Vocation “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 “He was alone in his wonderment, among creatures incapable of wonder --for them it was enough to exist and go their way.” ― Pope John Paul II “The ethos of redemption is realized in self-mastery, by means of temperance, that is, continence of desires.” ― Pope John Paul II, Blessed Are the Pure of Heart: Catechesis on the Sermon on the Mount and Writings of St. Paul “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 “...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 “A person's rightful due is to be treated as an object of love, not as an object for use.” ― Pope John Paul II, Love and Responsibility “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, Love and Responsibility “ 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 “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, Fides Et Ratio: On the Relationship Between Faith and Reason: Encyclical Letter of 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, Blessed Are the Pure of Heart: Catechesis on the Sermon on the Mount and Writings of St. Paul “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 “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, Blessed Are the Pure of Heart: Catechesis on the Sermon on the Mount and Writings of St. Paul “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, Purity of Heart: Reflections on Love and Lust / Pope John Paul II's Theology of the Body in Simple Language, Vol. 2 “It is the duty of every man to uphold the dignity of every woman.” ― Pope John Paul II “Learning to think rigorously, so as to act rightly and to serve humanity better.” ― 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 “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 “...if desire is predominant it can deform love between man and woman and rob them both of it.” ― Pope John Paul II, Love and Responsibility “Man cannot remain with no way out.” ― Pope John Paul II “The ethos of redemption is realized in self-mastery, by means of temperance, that is, continence of desires.” ― 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, Love and Responsibility “In the Vatican square, they were selling lollipops. You could buy lollipops about that big with the face of Pope John Paul II on them. You could buy a Pope John Paul II's face lollipop. I bought about ten.
And I just thought... In the light of his death a few months later, I wondered whether sales of those lollipops went up or whether they went down. Did good Catholics think, 'Ah, the Pope's just died. It would now seem inappropriate... to lick a sugar effigy of his face.' Or did they go, 'Ah, the Pope's just died. But what better way... ...to commemorate his life than by licking a sugar effigy of his face?” ― Stewart Lee “I at this writing am an old man, only three years short of my three score and ten. And they tell me that Wycliffe’s bones have been dug up and burned and cast into the river that leads to the sea. The Church--she thinks--has had her revenge. But, as I hear it, Wycliffe’s writings had already touched one man in Bohemia, John Huss, whom the Church burned several years ago. And though both Wycliffe and Huss be dead, There are rumors of unrest in that small country, unrest caused by those who seek true religion. In England, King Henry rules hand in glove with the Pope, but not forever, I think. We are still here--the Lollards, I mean. Did you guess it? Yes, I have become a “poor priest.” And I will tell you this: the writings of Wycliffe have been driven out of Oxford, but they can be found in every other nook in England. Indeed, many a time I have talked with an Oxford scholar on the road and have seen God open his heart to the truth. This is what Saint Paul meant when he spoke of Christians as being pressed but never pinned. The Church rages, but the truth goes on. Many a stout English yeoman embraces it in these days and leads his family in true godly worship. John Wycliffe was our morning star. When all was darkest and England lay asleep in the deadly arms of the papacy, God sent him to us. The Scripture has come to England. What will it hold back? Soon--though perhaps not in my lifetime-- the dawn will break, and there will be a new day in England. " ~ Sebastian Ayleton's son in "Morning Star of the Reformation” ― Andy Thomson “He [Pope Benedict XVI] spoke of the distilled message of John Paul's reign: "Be not afraid” ― Peggy Noonan Results for "Pope John Paul" (showing 41-51 of 51) (0.04 seconds) “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, Crossing the Threshold of Hope “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 “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.” ― Pope John Paul II, Letter to Artists “In 1968, Pope Paul VI responded instead with an encylical Humanae Vitae. The encyclical reaffirmed the Church's rejectionist stance: Contraceptives were evil and against God's law...In the West, many if not most Catholics ignored the ban. For them, however painful, the decision of whether to conceive or not was rarely a life-or-death issue. Unfortunately, for women in the poorest parts of the world, it often is. There, the
right to choose whether or not to conceive was vitally linked to a woman's prospects for freeing herself and her family from poverty. It is in this context that the inherent and deeply rooted misogyny of the Church has taken its greatest toll on the lives of women. Pope John Paul II spent a considerable part of his pontificate propagandizing on behalf of a doctrine that tells ppor and illiterate women that to use a condom is the moral equivalent of murder and that each time they use contraceptives they render Christ's sacrifice on the cross 'in vain'. He said:'no personal or social circumstances have ever been able, or will be able, to rectify the moral wrong of the contraceptive act.” ― Jack Holland, Misogyny: The World's Oldest Prejudice “Yesterday was a dark day in the history of humanity, a terrible affront to human dignity. After receiving the news, I followed with intense concern the developing situation, with heartfelt prayers to the Lord. How is it possible to commit acts of such savage cruelty? The human heart has depths from which schemes of unheard-of ferocity sometimes emerge, capable of destroying in a moment the normal daily life of a people. But faith comes to our aid at these times when words seem to fail. Christ’s word is the only one that can give a response to the questions which trouble our spirit. Even if the forces of darkness appear to prevail, those who believe in God know that evil and death do not have the final say. Christian hope is based on this truth; at this time our prayerful trust draws strength from it. ~General Audience, September 12, 2001.” ― Pope John Paul II “The social order will be all the more stable, the more it takes this fact into account and does not place in opposition personal interest and the interests of society as a whole, but rather seeks ways to bring them into fruitful harmony. In fact, where self-interest is violently suppressed, it is replaced by a burdensome system of bureaucratic control, which dries up the wellsprings of initiative and creativity. When people think they possess the secret of a perfect social organization which makes evil impossible, they also think that they can use any means, including violence and deceit, in order to bring that organization into being. Politics then becomes a "secular religion" which operates under the illusion of creating paradise in this world.” ― Pope John Paul II, On the Hundredth Anniversary of Rerum Novarum “Truth can prevail only in virtue of truth itself.” ― Pope John Paul II “Do not be afriad! I can see that Americans are not afraid. They are not afraid of the sun, they are not afraid of the wind, they are not afraid of 'today'. They are, generally speaking, brave, good people. And so I say to you today, always be brave. Do not be afraid. Do not be afraid. God is with you. Do not be afraid to search for God-then you will truly be the land of the free, the home of the brave. God Bless America.” ― Peggy Noonan, John Paul the Great: Remembering a Spiritual Father “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, Letter to Artists “Pope John Paul II returned to this theme, condemning state-recognized same-sex unions as parodic versions of authentic families, “based on individual egoism” rather than genuine love. Justifying that condemnation, he observed, “Such a ‘caricature’ has no future and cannot give future to any society”. Queers must respond to the violent force of such constant provocations not only by insisting on our equal right to the social order’s prerogatives, not only by avowing our capacity to promote that order’s coherence and integrity, but also by saying explicitly what Law and the Pope and the whole of the Symbolic order for which they stand hear anyway in each and every expression or manifestation of queer sexuality: Fuck the social order and the Child in whose name we’re collectively terrorized; fuck Annie; fuck the waif from Les Mis; fuck the poor, innocent kid on the Net; fuck Laws both with capital ls and small; fuck the
whole network of Symbolic relations and the future that serves as its prop.” ― Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive “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” ― Pope John Paul II, On the Occasion of the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Outbreak of the Second World War