Monday, May 05, 2014

Top 10 quotations from St. John Paul II


Now for a bit of sunshine, here are the all-time top ten favorite quotes of Dr. Taylor Marshall from St. John Paul II (comments his):
  1. “Faith and Reason are like two wings of the human spirit by which is soars to the truth.” (my personal favorite JP2 quote!)
  2. “Do not abandon yourselves to despair. We are the Easter people and Alleluia is our song.”
  3. “Do not be afraid. Do not be satisfied with mediocrity. Put out into the deep and let down your nets for a catch.”
  4. “I plead with you! Never, ever give up on hope, never doubt, never tire, and never become discouraged. Be not afraid.”
  5. “The worst prison would be a closed heart.”
  6. “A person’s rightful due is to be treated as an object of love, not as an object for use.”
  7. “As the family goes, so goes the nation and so goes the whole world in which we live.”
  8. “It is the duty of every man to uphold the dignity of every woman.” (this is a great one, gentlemen!)
  9. “If He asks much of you, it is because He knows you can give much.”
  10. “Love between man and woman cannot be built without sacrifices and self-denial.”

2 comments:

JM said...

Two More...

11. "Life is a gift of a certain period of time in which each of us faces a challenge which life itself brings: the challenge of having a purpose, a destiny, and of striving for it. The opposite is to spend our lives on the surface of things, to “lose” our lives in futility; never to discover in ourselves the capacity for good and for real solidarity, and therefore never to discover the path to true happiness. Too many young people do not realize that they themselves are the ones who are mainly responsible for giving a worthwhile meaning to their lives."

12. “I too, like you, was once 20 years old,” the pope told the youth.

“I liked to play sports, to ski, to act. I studied and I worked. I had desires and worries. In those years that are now far away, in times in which my homeland was wounded first by war and then by a totalitarian regime, I was searching for the sense to give to my life.”

“I found it,” he said, “in following the Lord Jesus.”

Pertinacious Papist said...

JM,

Nice.

There are many more which I like from his philosophical writings, particularly from his critiques of Kant and Scheler, but those are hardly in the category of "quotables."

I think this pope's forte may have been in his more philosophical reflections, and, perhaps, how these mesh with theological truths.

Linguistically, the challenge was always his style, which suffered from resembling that of Max Scheler, whom he had to learn to translate to read him in German. His sentences thus tend to be elliptical and meander a bit.