Top 40 Pope John XXIII Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Men are like wine – some turn to vinegar, but the best improve with age.”

— Pope John XXIII

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2. “Consult not your fears but your hopes and your dreams. Think not about your frustrations, but about your unfulfilled potential. Concern yourself not with what you tried and failed in, but with what it is still possible for you to do.”

— Pope John XXIII

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3. “What unites us, is much greater than what divides us.”

— Pope John XXIII

4. “The whole world is my family.”

— Pope John XXIII

5. “Whoever has a heart full of love always has something to give.”

— Pope John XXIII

6. “See everything, overlook a great deal, correct a little.”

— Pope John XXIII

7. “Do not walk through time without leaving worthy evidence of your passage.”

— Pope John XXIII

8. “Consult not your fears, but your hopes and your dreams.”

— Pope John XXIII

9. “I want to throw open the windows of the Church so that we can see out and the people can see in.”

— Pope John XXIII

10. “If God created shadows it was to better emphasise the light.”

— Pope John XXIII

11. “Prayer is the raising of the mind to God. We must always remember this. The actual words matter less.”

— Pope John XXIII

12. “Never Hesitate to hold out your hand; never hesitate to accept the outstretched hand of another.”

— Pope John XXIII

13. “I live by the mercy of Jesus, to whom I owe everything and from whom I expect everything.”

— Pope John XXIII

14. “The Rosary is a magnificent and universal prayer for the needs of the Church, the nations and the entire world.”

— Pope John XXIII

15. “Before everything else, fidelity to the Church: One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic. Jesus did not found several churches, but one single Church.”

— Pope John XXIII

16. “A peaceful man does more good than a learned one.”

— Pope John XXIII

17. “The family is the first essential cell of human society.”

— Pope John XXIII

18. “To keep me from sin and straying from Him, God has used devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament. My life vows destined to be spent in the light irradiating from the tabernacle, and it is to the Heart of Jesus that I dare go for the solution of all my problems.”

— Pope John XXIII

19. “The social progress, order, security and peace of each country are necessarily connected with the social progress, order, security and peace of all other countries.”

— Pope John XXIII

20. “It often happens that I wake up at night and begin to think about a serious problem and decide I must tell the Pope about it. Then I wake up completely and remember that I am the Pope.”

— Pope John XXIII

21. “It is easier for a father to have children than for children to have a real father.”

— Pope John XXIII

22. “Born poor, but of honored and humble people, I am particularly proud to die poor.”

— Pope John XXIII

23. “Here I am at the end of the road and at the top of the heap.”

— Pope John XXIII

24. “When I eat alone I feel like a seminarian being punished. I tried it for one week and I was not comfortable. Then I searched through Sacred Scripture for something saying I had to eat alone. I found nothing, so I gave it up and it’s much better now.”

— Pope John XXIII

25. “Justice comes before charity.”

— Pope John XXIII

26. “I have looked into your eyes with my eyes. I have put my heart near your heart.”

— Pope John XXIII

27. “Prudent is he who can keep silent that part of truth which may be untimely, and by not speaking it, does not spoil the truth of what he said.”

— Pope John XXIII

28. “I am made to tremble and I fear!”

— Pope John XXIII

29. “The council now beginning rises in the Church like the daybreak, a forerunner of most splendid light.”

— Pope John XXIII

30. “It is now for the Catholic Church to bend herself to her work with calmness and generosity. It is for you to observe her with renewed and friendly attention.”

— Pope John XXIII

31. “We supplicate all rulers not to remain deaf to the cry of mankind. Let them do everything in their power to save peace. By so doing they will spare the world the horrors of a war that would have disastrous consequences, such as nobody can foresee.”

— Pope John XXIII

32. “The Catholic Church has a dignity far surpassing that of every merely human society, for it was founded by Christ the Lord. It is altogether fitting, therefore, that the language it uses should be noble, majestic, and non-vernacular.”

— Pope John XXIII

33. “Italians come to ruin most generally in three ways, women, gambling, and farming. My family chose the slowest one.”

— Pope John XXIII

34. “The true and solid peace of nations consists not in equality of arms, but in mutual trust alone.”

— Pope John XXIII

35. “The Rosary is a school for learning true Christian perfection.”

— Pope John XXIII

36. “The nations of the world are becoming more and more dependent on one another and it will not be possible to preserve a lasting peace so long as glaring economic and social imbalances persist.”

— Pope John XXIII

37. “The feelings of my smallness and my nothingness always kept me good company.”

— Pope John XXIII

38. “An angel of Paradise, no less, is always beside me, wrapped in everlasting ecstasy on his Lord. So I am ever under the gaze of an angel who protects and prays for me.”

— Pope John XXIII

39. “I am able to follow my own death step by step. Now I move softly towards the end.”

— Pope John XXIII

40. “Every man has the right to life, to bodily integrity.”

— Pope John XXIII

41. “The conviction that all men are equal by reason of their natural dignity has been generally accepted. Hence racial discrimination can no longer be justified.”

— Pope John XXIII

42. “Anybody can be Pope; the proof of this is that I have become one.”

— Pope John XXIII

43. “Think not about your frustrations, but about your unfullfilled potential.”

— Pope John XXIII

44. “Mankind is a great, an immense family... This is proved by what we feel in our hearts at Christmas.”

— Pope John XXIII

45. “You must know that it is by the state of the lavatory that a family is judged.”

— Pope John XXIII