Quotes by John Paul II

Could God have justified Himself before human history, so full of suffering, without placing Christs Cross at the center of that history? . . . But God, who besides being Omnipotence is Wisdom and--to repeat once again--Love, desires to justify Himself to mankind. He is not the Absolute that remains outside of the world, indifferent to human suffering. he is Emmanuel, God-with-us, a God who shares mans lot and participates in his destiny.

~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~

Humankind, which discovers its capacity to transform and in a certain sense create the world through its own work, forgets that this is always based on Gods prior and original gift of things that are. People think that they can make arbitrary use of the earth, subjecting it without restraint to their wills, as though the earth did not have its own requisites and a prior God-given purpose, which human beings can indeed develop but must not betray.

Whenever a person is the object of your activity, remember that you may not treat that person as only the means to an end, as in instrument, but must allow for the fact that he or she, too, has or at least should have, distinct personal ends.

Those who devote themselves to the study of Sacred Scripture should always remember that the various hermeneutical approaches have their own philosophical underpinnings, which need to be carefully evaluated before they are applied to the sacred texts.

A person is an objective entity, which as a definite subject has the closest contacts with the whole (external) world and is most intimately involved with it precisely because of its inwardness, its interior life.

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.

A democracy without values easily turns into open or thinly disguised totalitarianism.

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

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

The human being is single, unique, and unrepeatable, someone thought of and chosen from eternity, someone called and identified by name

There is no dignity when the human dimension is eliminated from the person. In short, the problem with pornography is not that it shows too much of the person, but that it shows far too little.

Truth can prevail only in virtue of truth itself.

God allows man to learn His supernatural ends, but the decision to strive towards an end, the choice of course, is left to mans free will. God does not redeem man against his will.

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

The term person has been coined to signify that a man cannot be wholly contained within the concept individual member of the species, but that there is something more to him, a particular richness and perfection in the manner of his being, which can only be brought out by the use of the word person.

A person is an entity of a sort to which the only proper and adequate way to relate is love.

Faced with todays 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.

“Love consists of a commitment which limits ones freedom - it is a giving of the self, and to give oneself means just that: to limit ones freedom on behalf of another.”