Top 60 Pope Paul VI Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “If you want peace, work for justice.”

— Pope Paul VI

2. “Somebody should tell us, right at the start of our lives, that we are dying. Then we might live life to the limit, every minute of every day. Do it! I say. Whatever you want to do, do it now! There are only so many tomorrows.”

— Pope Paul VI

3. “The Mass is the most perfect form of prayer.”

— Pope Paul VI

4. “All life demands struggle. Those who have everything given to them become lazy, selfish, and insensitive to the real values of life. The very striving and hard work that we so constantly try to avoid is the major building block in the person we are today.”

— Pope Paul VI

5. “No more war, war never again! Peace, it is peace which must guide the destinies of people and of all mankind.”

— Pope Paul VI

6. “No more war! Never again war! If you wish to be brothers, drop your weapons.”

— Pope Paul VI

7. “Never reach out your hand unless you’re willing to extend an arm.”

— Pope Paul VI

8. “If evils increase, the devotion of the People of God should also increase.”

— Pope Paul VI

9. “Technological society has succeeded in multiplying the opportunities for pleasure, but it has great difficulty in generating joy.”

— Pope Paul VI

10. “In youth the days are short and the years are long. In old age the years are short and day’s long.”

— Pope Paul VI

11. “A dimple on the chin, the devil within.”

— Pope Paul VI

12. “Through some crack the smoke of satan has entered into the Church of God.”

— Pope Paul VI

13. “Liturgy is like a strong tree whose beauty is derived from the continuous renewal of its leaves, but whose strength comes from the old trunk, with solid roots in the ground.”

— Pope Paul VI

14. “Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament is the Living Heart of each of our parishes.”

— Pope Paul VI

15. “Excessive economic, social and cultural inequalities among peoples arouse tensions and conflicts, and are a danger to peace.”

— Pope Paul VI

16. “The international trading system was devised by the rich to suit their needs; it ignores those of the poor.”

— Pope Paul VI

17. “The older the fiddler, the sweeter the tune.”

— Pope Paul VI

18. “Every mother is like Moses. She does not enter the promised land. She prepares a world she will not see.”

— Pope Paul VI

19. “This world in which we live needs beauty in order not to sink into despair. It is beauty, like truth, which brings joy to the heart of man and is that precious fruit which resists the year and tear of time, which unites generations and makes them share things in admiration.”

— Pope Paul VI

20. “Of all human activities, man’s listening to God is the supreme act of his reasoning and will.”

— Pope Paul VI

21. “This pious practice, by which the Blessed Virgin Mary is honored and the Christian people enriched with spiritual gifts, gladdens and consoles us. Mary remains ever the path that leads to Christ. Every encounter with her can only result in an encounter with Christ himself.”

— Pope Paul VI

22. “The work of art, just like any fragment of human life considered in its deepest meaning, seems to me devoid of value if it does not offer the hardness, the rigidity, the regularity, the luster on every interior and exterior facet, of the crystal.”

— Pope Paul VI

23. “Never give advice in a crowd.”

— Pope Paul VI

24. “Priestly celibacy has been guarded by the Church for centuries as a brilliant jewel, and retains its value undiminished even in our time when the outlook of men and the state of the world have undergone such profound changes.”

— Pope Paul VI

25. “We see in these swift and skillful travelers a symbol of our life, which seeks to be a pilgrimage and a passage on this earth for the way of heaven.”

— Pope Paul VI

26. “For peace is not simply the absence of warfare, based on a precarious balance of power; it is fashioned by efforts directed day after day toward the establishment of the ordered universe willed by God, with a more perfect form of justice among men.”

— Pope Paul VI

27. “Are there memories left that are safe from the clutches of phony anniversaries?”

— Pope Paul VI

28. “The transmission of human life is a most serious role in which married people collaborate freely and responsibly with God the Creator.”

— Pope Paul VI

29. “Anger is as a stone cast into a wasp’s nest.”

— Pope Paul VI

30. “I met a hundred men going to Delhi and everyone is my brother.”

— Pope Paul VI

31. “Physics does not change the nature of the world it studies, and no science of behavior can change the essential nature of man, even though both sciences yield technologies with a vast power to manipulate the subject matters.”

— Pope Paul VI

32. “Justice is not always an open and shut case – sometimes we have to work for it. If you want peace, you must work for justice.”

— Pope Paul VI

33. “Satan’s smoke has made its way into the Temple of God through some crack.”

— Pope Paul VI

34. “We must see to it that enthusiasm for the future does not give rise to contempt for the past.”

— Pope Paul VI

35. “Idleness or boredom has no place in the life of a Christian.”

— Pope Paul VI

36. “The hungry nations of the world cry out to the peoples blessed with abundance. And the Church, cut to the quick by this cry, asks each and every man to hear his brother’s plea and answer it lovingly.”

— Pope Paul VI

37. “We would also like you to know that the Church recognizes the riches of the Islamic faith – a faith that binds us to the one God.”

— Pope Paul VI

38. “True humanism points the way toward God and acknowledges the task to which we are called, the task which offers us the real meaning of human life. Man is not the ultimate measure of man. Man becomes truly man only by passing beyond himself.”

— Pope Paul VI

39. “Lord, to whom should we go? Thy words are the words of eternal life.”

— Pope Paul VI

40. “The Church acknowledges Gregorian chant as specially suited to the Roman liturgy: therefore, other things being equal, it should be given pride of place in liturgical services. But other kinds of sacred music, especially polyphony, are by no means excluded from liturgical celebrations, so long as they accord with the spirit of the liturgical action.”

— Pope Paul VI

41. “We consider Christmas as the encounter, the great encounter, the historical encounter, the decisive encounter, between God and mankind. He who has faith knows this truly; let him rejoice.”

— Pope Paul VI

42. “Failing to be there when a man wants her is a woman’s greatest sin, except to be there when he doesn’t want her.”

— Pope Paul VI

43. “It is called the real presence, not in an exclusive sense, as though other forms of presence were not real, but by reason of its excellence. It is the substantial presence by which Christ is made present without doubt, whole and entire, God and man.”

— Pope Paul VI

44. “No member of the faithful could possibly deny that the Church is competent in her magisterium to interpret the natural moral law.”

— Pope Paul VI

45. “The Eucharistic mystery stands at the heart and center of the liturgy since it is the fount of life by which we are cleansed and strengthened to live not for ourselves but for God and to be united in love among ourselves.”

— Pope Paul VI

46. “Individual initiative alone and the mere free play of competition could never assure successful development. One must avoid the risk of increasing still more the wealth of the rich and the dominion of the strong, whilst leaving the poor in their misery and adding to the servitude of the oppressed.”

— Pope Paul VI

47. “Christ did not found an abstract religion, a mere school of religious thought. He setup a community of apostles, of teachers, with the task of spreading His message and so giving rise to a society of believers: His Church. He promised the Spirit of truth to His Church and then sent Him.”

— Pope Paul VI

48. “To love can mean ‘to love oneself,’ and often love is no more than a juxtaposition of two solitudes.”

— Pope Paul VI

49. “The freedom or immunity from coercion in matters religious, which is the endowment of persons as individuals, is also to be recognized as their right when they act in community. Religious communities are a requirement of the social nature both of man and of religion itself.”

— Pope Paul VI

50. “You must strive to multiply bread so that it suffices for the tables of mankind, and not rather favor an artificial control of birth, which would be irrational, in order to diminish the number of guests at the banquet of life.”

— Pope Paul VI