Pope Benedict XVI Quotes

Ultimately, in the battle against lies and violence, truth and love have no other weapon than the witness of suffering.

God is our Father and loves us, even when his silence remains incomprehensible.

Without the Eucharist, the Church simply does not exist.

Each of us has a mission . . . each of us is called to change the world, to work for a culture of life, a culture forged by love and respect for the dignity of each human person.

God is not solitude, but perfect communion. For this reason the human person, the image of God, realizes himself or herself in love, which is a sincere gift of self.

Prayer, as a means of drawing ever new strength from Christ, is concretely and urgently needed.

Rediscover the joy of believing.

Society as a whole must defend the conceived child's right to life and the true good of the woman who can never, in any circumstances, find fulfilment in the decision to abort.

Preservation of the environment, promotion of sustainable development and particular attention to climate change are matters of grave concern for the entire human family.

Dear young people, let me now ask you a question. What will you leave to the next generation? Are you building your lives on firm foundations, building something that will endure?

The freedom to kill is not a true freedom, but a tyranny that reduces human beings to slavery.

The essence of Christianity...is an ever-new encounter with... the God who speaks to us, who approaches us and who befriends us!

Seeing with the eyes of Christ, I can give to others much more than their outward necessities; I can give them the look of love which they crave.

Dancing is not a form of expression for the Christian liturgy.

If only everyone could experience the joy of being Christian, being loved by God Who gave His Son for us!

Following Jesus in faith is to walk with him in the communion of the Church. You cannot follow Jesus alone.

The extermination of millions of unborn children, in the name of the fight against poverty, actually constitutes the destruction of the poorest of all human beings.

You have before you the task of seeking new ways to announce Christ in situations of rapid and often profound transformation, and of emphasizing the missionary character of all pastoral activity.

I believe that the most important thing...is to revive in the whole Church that positive tension, that yearning to announce Christ again to contemporary man.

Do not be afraid to say “yes” to Jesus, to find your joy in doing his will...

Grant that we may be one flock and one shepherd! Do not allow your net to be torn, help us to be servants of unity!

Nourishment is a factor which touches on the fundamental right to life.

God's heart calls to our hearts, inviting us to come out of ourselves, to forsake our human certainties, to trust in him and, by following his example, to make ourselves a gift of unbounded love.

Poverty is a plague against which humanity must fight without cease.

The Catholic tradition maintains that the objective norms governing right action are accessible to reason, prescinding from the content of revelation.

A theologian who does not love art, poetry, music and nature can be dangerous. Blindness and deafness toward the beautiful are not incidental; they necessarily are reflected in his theology.

Listen to the voice of the earth.

Rock... is the expression of elemental passions... In the ecstasy of having all their defenses torn down, the participants sink, as it were, beneath the elemental force of the universe.

In a nuclear war there would be no victors, only victims. The truth of peace requires that all ... strive for a progressive and concerted nuclear disarmament.

Our world has grown weary of greed, exploitation and division, of the tedium of false idols and piecemeal responses, and the pain of false promises.

[The atheist believes] a world marked by so much injustice, innocent suffering, and cynicism of power cannot be the work of a good God.

Standards of conduct appropriate to civil society or the workings of a democracy cannot be purely and simply applied to the Church.

Civilization is now under the tyranny of relativism.

You must know your faith with the same precision with which a specialist in information technology knows the operating system of a computer.

[Non-Catholic Christians are] in a gravely deficient situation in comparison with those who, in the [Roman Catholic] church, have the fullness of the means of salvation.

Without fear we must set sail on the digital sea.

Let us seek in particular to communicate the deepest joy, that of knowing God in Christ.

God's love for his people is so great that it turns God against himself, his love against his justice.

Today, I, too, wish to reaffirm that I intend to continue on the path toward improved relations and friendship with the Jewish people, following the decisive lead given by John Paul II.

How can it be that the most wonderous and sacred human space - the womb - has become a place of unutterable violence?

Art and the saints are the greatest apologetics for our faith.

Joy is the true gift of Christmas, and we can communicate this joy simply: with a smile, a kind gesture, a little help, forgiveness. And the joy we give will certainly come back to us.

Love alone makes us happy, because we live in relation, and we live to love and to be loved.

Love is not greedy or self-seeking, but pure, faithful and genuinely free, open to others, respectful of their dignity, seeking their good, radiating joy and beauty.

Art means: revealing God in everything that exists.

We celebrate [Easter] because now, thanks to the risen Lord, it is definitively established that reason is stronger than unreason, truth stronger than lies, love stronger than death.

Consecrated life means going to the very root of the love of Jesus Christ with an undivided heart and putting nothing ahead of this love.

The highest things, the things that really matter, we cannot achieve on our own; we have to accept them as gifts and enter in to the dynamic of the gift, so to speak.

A thirst for the infinite is indelibly present in human beings. Man was created to have a relationship with God; we need him.

An authentically eucharistic Church is a missionary Church... Truly, nothing is more beautiful than to know Christ and to make him known to others.