John Paul II Quotes

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.

The ethos of redemption is realied in self-mastery, by means of temperance, that is, continence of desires.

Life is entrusted to man as a treasure which must not be squandered, as a talent which must be used well.

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.

Without wonder, men and women would lapse into deadening routine and little by little would become incapable of a life which is genuinely personal.

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.

The cross means there is no shipwreck without hope; there is no dark without dawn; nor storm without haven.

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.

...if desire is predominant it can deform love between man and woman and rob them both of it.

Love demands a personal commitment to the will of God.

...all that is carried along
by the stream's silvery cascade,
rhythmically falling from the mountain,
carried by its own current — carried where?

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.

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.

"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."

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.