Top 300 Pope Benedict XVI Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “The aim of all Christian education, moreover, is to train the believer in an adult faith that can make him a “new creation”, capable of bearing witness in his surroundings to the Christian hope that inspires him.”

— Pope Benedict XVI

52. “Man is a relational being. And if his first, fundamental relationship is disturbed – his relationship with God – then nothing else can be truly in order.”

— Pope Benedict XVI

53. “Indeed, truth draws strength from itself and not from the number of votes in its favour.”

— Pope Benedict XVI

54. “We are not some casual and meaningless product of evolution. Each of us is the result of a thought of God.”

— Pope Benedict XVI

55. “Forgiveness does not replace justice.”

— Pope Benedict XVI

56. “Art is elemental. Reason alone as it’s expressed in the sciences can’t be man’s complete answer to reality, and it can’t express everything that man can, wants to, and has to express. I think God built this into man. Art along with science is the highest gift God has given him.”

— Pope Benedict XVI

57. “Dear young people, the Church depends on you! She needs your lively faith, your creative charity and the energy of your hope. Your presence renews, rejuvenates and gives new energy to the Church.”

— Pope Benedict XVI

58. “Help each other to live and to grow in the Christian faith so as to be valiant witnesses of the Lord. Be united, but not closed. Be humble, but not fearful. Be simple, but not naive. Be thoughtful, but not complicated. Enter into dialogue with others, but be yourselves.”

— Pope Benedict XVI

59. “I am convinced that music really is the universal language of beauty which can bring together all people of good will on earth.”

— Pope Benedict XVI

60. “With the Eucharist, therefore, heaven comes down to earth, the tomorrow of God descends into the present and it is as if time remains embraced by divine eternity.”

— Pope Benedict XVI

61. “God seeks us where we are, not so that we stay there, but so that we may come to be where He is, so that we may get beyond ourselves.”

— Pope Benedict XVI

62. “Eternity is not an unending succession of days in the calendar, but something more like the supreme moment of satisfaction, in which totality embraces us and we embrace totality.”

— Pope Benedict XVI

63. “Without the Eucharist, the Church simply does not exist.”

— Pope Benedict XVI

64. “The capacity to accept suffering for the sake of goodness, truth and justice is an essential criterion of humanity, because if my own well-being and safety are ultimately more important than truth and justice, then the power of the stronger prevails, then violence and untruth reigns supreme.”

— Pope Benedict XVI

65. “Rediscover the joy of believing.”

— Pope Benedict XVI

66. “Global interconnectedness has led to the emergence of a new political power, that of consumers and their associations. It is good for people to realize that purchasing is always a moral – and not simply economic – act.”

— Pope Benedict XVI

67. “We become new if we let ourselves be grasped and shaped by the new Man, Jesus Christ. He is the new Man par excellence. In him the new human existence became reality and we can truly become new if we deliver ourselves into his hands and let ourselves be moulded by him.”

— Pope Benedict XVI

68. “Everything is a gift from God: it is only by recognizing this crucial dependence on the Creator that we will find freedom and peace.”

— Pope Benedict XVI

69. “Holiness never goes out of fashion.”

— Pope Benedict XVI

70. “God came into the world to reawaken the thirst for great things in us.”

— Pope Benedict XVI

71. “Men and women were created for something great, for infinity. Nothing else will ever be enough.”

— Pope Benedict XVI

72. “I say to you dear young people: Do not be afraid of Christ! He takes nothing away, and He gives you verything. When we give ourselves to him, we receive a hundredfold in return. Yes, open, open wide the doors to Christ and you will find true life.”

— Pope Benedict XVI

73. “Hope is practiced through the virtue of patience, which continues to do good even in the face of apparent failure, and through the virtue of humility, which accepts God’s mystery and trusts him even at times of darkness.”

— Pope Benedict XVI

74. “Art and the saints are the greatest apologetics for our faith.”

— Pope Benedict XVI

75. “Do not believe that living together before marriage guarantees the future. By burning certain stages, you risk burning love itself. Time needs to be respected gradually, just like the expressions of love.”

— Pope Benedict XVI

76. “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.”

— Pope Benedict XVI

77. “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.”

— Pope Benedict XVI

78. “A Christian knows when it is time to speak of God and when it is better to say nothing and to let love alone speak. He knows that God is love and that God’s presence is felt at the very time when the only thing we do is to love.”

— Pope Benedict XVI

79. “Rock music is a vehicle of anti-religion.”

— Pope Benedict XVI

80. “To make the sign of the cross is to pronounce a visible and public yes to him who died for us and who is risen, to the God who in the humility and weakness of his love is omnipotent, stronger than all the power and intelligence of the world.”

— Pope Benedict XVI

81. “The fundamental task of the evangelization of culture is the challenge to make God visible in the human face of Jesus.”

— Pope Benedict XVI

82. “What does Sunday, the day of the Lord, mean for us? It is a day for rest and for family, but first of all a day for Him.”

— Pope Benedict XVI

83. “Joy is the true gift of Christmas...”

— Pope Benedict XVI

84. “Let us allow ourselves to be ‘infected’ by St. Joseph’s silence! We need it greatly, in a world that is often too noisy, that does not favor meditation or listening to the voice of God.”

— Pope Benedict XVI

85. “One doesn’t begin to be a Christian because of an ethical decision or a great idea, but rather because of an encounter with an event, with a Person, who gives new horizons to life, and with that, a decisive orientation.”

— Pope Benedict XVI

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

— Pope Benedict XVI

87. “Listen to the voice of the earth...”

— Pope Benedict XVI

88. “Faith was intended precisely for the simple, but the quest for certainty and simplicity becomes dangerous when it leads to fanaticism and narrow-mindedness. When reason as such becomes suspect, then faith itself becomes falsified.”

— Pope Benedict XVI

89. “The Christian faith can never be separated from the soil of sacred events, from the choice made by God, who wanted to speak to us, to become man, to die and rise again, in a particular place and at a particular time.”

— Pope Benedict XVI

90. “Many people perceive Christianity as something institutional – rather than as an encounter with Christ – which explains why they don’t see it as a source of joy.”

— Pope Benedict XVI

91. “Every human being is loved by God the Father. No one need feel forgotten, for every name is written in the Lord’s loving heart.”

— Pope Benedict XVI

92. “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.”

— Pope Benedict XVI

93. “Sometimes we are looked upon as people who speak only of prohibitions. Nothing could be further from the truth! Authentic Christian discipleship is marked by a sense of wonder. We stand before the God we know and love as a friend, the vastness of his creation, and the beauty of our Christian faith.”

— Pope Benedict XVI

94. “In the eyes of the unrighteous it appeared that God did not intervene and that His Son died, but for believers it was at that precise moment that true glory was manifested and definitive salvation achieved.”

— Pope Benedict XVI

95. “The Church’s mission is not political in nature. Her task is to open the world to the religious sense by proclaiming Christ.”

— Pope Benedict XVI

96. “Love is the very process of passing over, of transformation, of stepping outside the limitations of fallen humanity – in which we are all separated from one another and ultimately impenetrable to one another – into an infinite otherness.”

— Pope Benedict XVI

97. “To the extent that we nourish ourselves on Christ and are in love with him, we feel within us the incentive to bring others to him: Indeed, we cannot keep the joy of the faith to ourselves; we must pass it on.”

— Pope Benedict XVI

98. “Chicks bleed out their vaginas all the time.”

— Pope Benedict XVI

99. “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.”

— Pope Benedict XVI

100. “We can fall, but in the end we fall into God’s hands, and God’s hands are good hands.”

— Pope Benedict XVI