A collection of Saint John Paul II quotes and sayings. He is probably the most famous and greatest man of the 20th Century.
The truth is not always the same as the majority decision. ~St. 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.” St. John Paul II
An excuse is worse and more terrible than a lie, for an excuse is a lie guarded. ~St. John Paul II
Freedom consists not in doing what we like, but in having the right to do what we ought. ~St. John Paul II
Do not abandon yourselves to despair. We are the Easter people and hallelujah is our song. ~St. John Paul II
Mary is the sure path to our meeting with Christ. Devotion to the Mother of the Lord, when it is genuine, is always an impetus to a life guided by the spirit and values of the Gospel. ~St. John Paul II
Science can purify religion from error and superstition. Religion can purify science from idolatry and false absolutes. ~St. John Paul II
The worst prison would be a closed heart. ~St. John Paul II
Social justice cannot be attained by violence. Violence kills what it intends to create. ~St. John Paul II
Violence and arms can never resolve the problems of men. ~St. John Paul II
War is a defeat for humanity. ~St. John Paul II
Life is entrusted to man as a treasure which must not be squandered, as a talent which must be used well. ~St. John Paul II
Know what you are talking about. ~St. 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. ~St. John Paul II
God is Love. We eventually have to ask ourselves the question; why was Love nailed to a cross? ~St. John Paul II
Be not afraid. ~St. John Paul II
The way Jesus shows you is not easy. Rather, it is like a path winding up a mountain. Do not lose heart! The steeper the road, the faster it rises towards ever wider horizons. ~St. John Paul II
Man’s life comes from God: it is his image and imprint, as sharing in his breath of life. God therefore is the sole Lord of this life: Man cannot do with it as he wills. ~St. John Paul II
Wages must enable the worker and his family to have access to a truly human standard of living in the material, social, cultural and spiritual orders. It is the dignity of the person which constitutes the criterion for judging work, not the other way around. ~St. John Paul II
Darkness can only be scattered by light, hatred can only be conquered by love. ~St. John Paul II
True holiness does not mean a flight from the world; rather, it lies in the effort to incarnate the Gospel in everyday life, in the family, at school and at work, and in social and political involvement. ~St. John Paul II
There is no evil to be faced that Christ does not face with us. There is no enemy that Christ has not already conquered. There is no cross to bear that Christ has not alreasy borne for us, and does not now bear with us. ~St. John Paul II
Finally, true freedom is not advanced in the per missive society, which confuses freedom with licence 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. There are many examples of this mistaken idea of freedom, such as the elimination of human life by legalized or generally accepted abortion. ~St. John Paul II
Do not forget that true love sets no conditions; it does not calculate or complain, but simply loves. ~St. John Paul II
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. ~St. John Paul II
What really maters in life is that we are loved by Christ and that we love Him in return. In comparison to the love of Jesus, everything else is secondary. And, without the love of Jesus, everything is useless. ~St. John Paul II
As the family goes, so goes the nation and so goes the whole world in which we live. ~St. John Paul II
I cannot fail to note once again that the poor constitute the modern challenge, especially for the well-off of our planet, where millions of people live in inhuman conditions and many are literally dying of hunger. It is not possible to announce God the Father to these brothers and sisters without taking on the responsibility of building a more just society in the name of Christ. ~St. John Paul II
Stupidity is also a gift from God, but one mustn’t misuse it. ~St. John Paul II
On Mahatma Ghandi, during a visit to India in 1986:”He was never a Christian and he never pretended to be a Christian, but I learned a lot from him.” ~St. John Paul II
Forgiveness is above all a personal choice, a decision of the heart to go against the natural instinct to pay back evil with evil. ~St. John Paul II
The future starts today, not tomorrow. ~St. John Paul II
Thus to share in the sufferings of Christ is, at the same time, to suffer For the kingdom of God. In the eyes of the just God, before his judgement, Those who share in the sufferings of Christ become worthy of this kingdom. ~St. John Paul II
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. ~St. 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. ~St. John Paul II
Precisely in an age when the inviolable rights of the person are solemnly proclaimed and the value of life is publicly affirmed, the very right to life is being denied or trampled upon, especially at the more significant moments of existence: the moment of birth and the moment of death. ~St. John Paul II
The cemetery of the victims of human cruelty in our century is extended to include yet another vast cemetery, that of the unborn. ~St. John Paul II
I have a sweet tooth for song and music. This is my Polish sin. ~St. John Paul II
A nation that kills its own children has no future. ~St. John Paul II
Physical condition or advancing of age are not obstacles to a perfect life. God does not look at external things but at the soul. ~St. John Paul II
The question confronting the Church today is not any longer whether the man in the street can grasp a religious message, but how to employ the communications media so as to let him have the full impact of the Gospel message. ~St. John Paul II
In Christ and through Christ man has acquired full awareness of his dignity, of the heights to which he is raised, of the surpasssing worth of his own humanity, and of the meaning of his existence. ~St. 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. ~St. John Paul II
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. ~St. John Paul II
Euthanasia is a grave violation of the law of God, since it is the deliberate and morally unacceptable killing of a human person. ~St. John Paul II
The evil of our times consists in the first place in a kind of degradation, indeed in a pulverization, of the fundamental uniqueness of each human person. ~St. John Paul II
Truth must be the foundation stone, the cement to solidify the entire social edifice. ~St. John Paul II
Each man, in his suffering, can also become a sharer in the redemptive suffering of Christ. ~St. John Paul II
The distinctive mark of the Christian, today more than ever, must be love for the poor, the weak, the suffering. ~St. John Paul II
It is a mistake to apply American democratic procedures to the faith and the truth. You cannot take a vote on the truth. The value of democracy stands or falls with the values which it embodies and promotes. ~St. John Paul II
The family, as the fundamental and essential educating community, is the privileged means for transmitting the religious and cultural values which help the person to acquire his or her own identity. Founded on love and open to the gift of life, the family contains in itself the very future of society; its most special task is to contribute effectively to a future of peace. ~St. John Paul II
Dear young people of every language and culture, a high and exhilarating task awaits you: that of becoming men and women capable of solidarity, peace and love of life, with respect for everyone. Become craftsmen of a new humanity, where brothers and sisters — members all of the same family — are able at last to live in peace. ~St. John Paul II
Abortion, euthanasia, human cloning, for example, risk reducing the human person to a mere object: life and death to order, as it were! ~St. John Paul II
The commandment you shall not kill even in its more positive aspects of respecting, loving, and promoting human life, is binding on every individual human being. ~St. John Paul II
Similarly, euthanasia and assisted suicide are never acceptable acts of mercy. They always gravely exploit the suffering and desperate, extinguishing life in the name of the “quality of life” itself. ~St. John Paul II
The sickness of a family member, friend or neighbor is a call to Christians to demonstrate true compassion, that gentle and persevering sharing in another’s pain. ~St. John Paul II
To humanity, which sometimes seems to be lost and dominated by the power of evil, selfishness and fear, the risen Lord gives the gift of His love which forgives, reconciles and reopens the soul to hope. ~St. John Paul II
While it is true that the taking of life not yet born or in it’s final stages is sometimes marked by a mistaken sense of altruism and human compassion it cannot be denied that such a culture of death, taken as a whole, betrays a completely individualistic concept of freedom, which ends up by becoming the freedom of “the strong” against the weak who have no choice but to submit. ~St. John Paul II
The Gospel of life must be proclaimed and human life defended in all places and all times. ~St. John Paul II
And Christ, through His own salvific suffering, is very much present in every human suffering, and can act from within that suffering by the powers of His Spirit of truth, His consoling spirit. ~St. John Paul II
Peace is not just the absence of war. Like a cathedral, peace must be constructed patiently and with unshakable faith. ~St. John Paul II
Anything done for another is done for oneself. ~St. John Paul II
In the newborn child is realized the common good of the family. ~St. John Paul II
Do not be afraid to be saints. Follow Jesus Christ who is the source of freedom and light. Be open to the Lord so that He may lighten all your ways. ~St. John Paul II
The saints have always been the source and origin of renewal in the most difficult moments in the Church’s history. ~St. John Paul II