Pope John Paul II Quotes

Do not drink coffee in early A.M. It will keep you awake until noon. Do not go from the slavery of the Communist regime to the slavery of consumerism.

Once the truth is denied to human beings, it is pure illusion to try to set them free. Truth and freedom either go together hand in hand or together they perish in misery.

The Rosary is my favorite prayer. A marvelous prayer! Marvelous in its simplicity and its depth. In the prayer we repeat many times the words that the Virgin Mary heard from the Archangel, and from her kinswoman Elizabeth.

The international community should support a system of laws to regularize international relations and maintain the peace in the same manner that law governs national order.

I hope that your example attracts many souls to the adoration of Jesus Christ who is present on the altar to be of comfort and hope to those who confide in him with faith and love; they look on him as the Emmanuel, God with us, who wished to dwell amongst us: his heart in our heart

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.

There is no need to be dismayed if love sometimes follows torturous ways. Grace has the power to make straight the paths of human love.

Opting for peace does not mean a passive acquiescence to evil or compromise of principle. It demands an active struggle against hatred, oppression and disunity, but not by using methods of violence. Building peace requires creative and courageous action

If you really wish to follow Christ, if you want your love for him to grow and last, then you must be faithful to prayer. It is the key to the vitality of your life in Christ. Without prayer, your faith and love will die. If you are constant in daily prayer and in the Sunday celebration of Mass, your love for Jesus will increase. And your heart will know deep joy and peace, such as the world could never give.

Dear young people, let yourselves be taken over by the light of Christ, and spread that light wherever you are.

Side by side with the miseries of underdevelopment...we find ourselves up against a form of superdevelopment, equally inadmissable. This superdevelopment consists in an excessive availability of material goods for the benefit of certain social groups and makes people slaves of "possession" and immediate gratification, with no other horizon than the multiplication or continual replacement of the things already owned with others still better. This is the civilization of consumption, or "consumerism," which involves so much throwing away and waste.

Do you think that there can be anything greater than to bring Jesus to people and people to Jesus?

To maintain a joyful family requires much from both the parents and the children. Each member of the family has to become, in a special way, the servant of the others.

For a stalk to grow or a flower to open there must be time that cannot be forced; nine months must go by for the birth of a human child; to write a book or compose music often years must be dedicated to patient research ...To find the mystery there must be patience, interior purification, silence, waiting.

The frenetic pace of modern life can lead to an obscuring or even a loss of what is truly human... Perhaps more than in other periods of history, our time is in need of that genius which belongs to women, and which can ensure sensitivity for human beings in every circumstance.

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.

God passionately desires and ardently yearns for our salvation... Nothing is greater than this: that the blood of God was poured out for us.

Prayer gives us strength for great ideals, for keeping up our faith, charity, purity, generosity; prayer gives us strength to rise up from indifference and guilt, if we have had the misfortune to give in to temptation and weakness. Prayer gives us light by which to see and to judge from God's perspective and from eternity. That is why you must not give up on praying!

Solidarity is not a feeling of vague compassion or shallow distress at the misfortunes of so many people, both near and far. On the contrary, it is a firm and persevering determination to commit oneself to the common good; that is to say to the good of all and of each individual, because we are all really responsible for all

Once again, through myself, the Church, in the words of the well-known declaration Nostra Aetate, 'deplores the hatred, persecutions and displays of anti-Semitism directed against the Jews at any time and by anyone.' I repeat, 'By anyone.'

People are made for happiness. Rightly, then, you thirst for happiness. Christ has the answer to this desire of yours. But he asks you to trust him.

Learning to think rigorously, so as to act rightly and to serve humanity better.

Commending the victims to almighty God's mercy, I implore his strength upon all involved in rescue efforts and in caring for the survivors.

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.

We cannot interfere in one area of the ecosystem without paying due attention to both the consequences of such interference in other areas and to the well-being of future generations.

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.

The Eucharist is the source and summit of the Christian life

America you are beautiful . . . and blessed . . . . The ultimate test of your greatness is the way you treat every human being, but especially the weakest and most defenseless. If you want equal justice for all and true freedom and lasting peace, then America, defend life.

Art has a unique capacity to take one or other facet of the message and translate it into colors, shapes and sounds which nourish the intuition of those who look and listen.

I kiss the soil as if I placed a kiss on the hands of a mother, for the homeland is our earthly mother. I consider it my duty to be with my compatriots in this sublime and difficult moment.

Social justice cannot be attained by violence. Violence kills what it intends to create.

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.

As the family goes, so goes the nation and so goes the whole world in which we live.

The film industry has become a universal medium exercising a profound influence on the development of people's attitudes and choices, and possessing a remarkable ability to influence public opinion and culture across all social and political frontiers.

A community needs a soul if it is to become a true home for human beings. You.. the people must give it this soul.

Reason and faith cannot be separated without diminishing the capacity of men and women to know themselves, the world and God in an appropriate way.

To recite the Rosary is nothing other than to contemplate the face of Christ with Mary.

We need a new apologetic, geared to the needs of today, which keeps in mind that our task is not to win arguments but to win souls... Such an apologetic will need to breathe a spirit of humanity, that humility and compassion which understand the anxieties and questions of people.

Each man, in his suffering, can also become a sharer in the redemptive suffering of Christ.

Since Christ is the only way to the Father, in order to highlight His living and saving presence in the Church and the world, the International Eucharistic Congress will take place in Rome, on the occasion of the Great Jubilee. The Year 2000 will be intensely Eucharistic: in the Sacrament of the Eucharist the Savior, who took flesh in Mary's womb twenty centuries ago, continues to offer Himself to humanity as the source of Divine Life

The [abortion] excommunication affects all those who commit this crime with knowledge of the penalty attached, and thus includes those accomplices without which the crime would not have been committed.

Amongst all unimportant subjects, football is by far the most important.

The choice of euthanasia becomes more serious when it takes the form of a murder committed by others on a person who has in no way requested it and who has never consented to it. The height of arbitrariness and injustice is reached when certain people, such as physicians or legislators, arrogate to themselves the power to decide who ought to live and who ought to die.

Do not be afraid to be the saints of the new mellineum!

As believers, how can we fail to see that abortion, euthanasia and assisted suicide are a terrible rejection of God's gift of life and love? And as believers, how can we fail to feel the duty to surround the sick and those in distress with the warmth of our affection and the support that will help them always to embrace life?

On my knees, I beg of you to turn away from the paths of violence and to return to the path of peace. Those who resort to violence always claim that only violence brings about change. You must know there is a political, peaceful way to justice.

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.

Those in society who are in charge of schools must never forget that the parents have been appointed by God himself as the first and principal educators of their children and that their right is completely inalienable.