Quotes from Pope Benedict XVI

If we may not remain silent about evil in the Church, then neither should we keep silent about the great shining path of goodness and purity which the Christian faith has traced out over the course of the centuries.

We have to see that the human person needs the infinite. If God's not there, if the infinite isn't available, the human person creates its own paradises, giving the appearance of 'infinitude' that can only be a lie.

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

It is of great concern that the fabric of African life, its very source of hope and stability, is threatened by divorce, abortion, prostitution, human trafficking, and a contraception mentality.

We let ourselves be molded and transformed by Christ and continually pass from the side of one who destroys to that of the one who saves.

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

Nature expresses a design of love and truth.

How much we need, in the church and in society, witnesses of the beauty of holiness, witnesses of the splendour of truth, witnesses of the joy and freedom born of a living relationship with Christ!

The Gospel purifies and renews, it bears fruit, wherever the community of believers hears it and receives God's grace in truth and charity. This is my confidence, this is my joy.

Sometimes we are looked upon as people who speak only of prohibitions. Nothing could be further from the truth!

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.

We cannot live, we cannot look at the truth about ourselves without letting ourselves be looked at and generated by Christ in daily Eucharistic Adoration.

Tell others about the truth that sets you free.

The Gospel purifies and renews: it bears fruit wherever the community of believers hears and welcomes the grace of God in truth and lives in charity. This is my faith this is my joy.

Since politics fundamentally should be a moral enterprise, the church in this sense has something to say about politics.

Today we have to learn all over again that love for the sinner and love for the person who has been harmed are correctly balanced if I punish the sinner in the form that is possible and appropriate.

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.

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.

God loves us despite our shortcomings and sins, and his love gives meaning to our lives and to the life of the world.

I urge you to continue your fraternal cooperation with one another in the spirit of the community of Christ's disciples, united in your love for him and in the Gospel that you proclaim.

The one and only Gospel waits to be proclaimed by everyone together, in love and reciprocal esteem.

The counterweight to the dominion of evil can consist in the first place only in the divine-human love of Jesus Christ that is always greater than any possible power of evil.

Mary's greatness consists in the fact that she wants to magnify God, not herself.