"People are often unreasonable and self-centered. Forgive them anyway.
If you are kind, people may accuse you of ulterior motives. Be kind anyway.

If you are honest, people may cheat you. Be honest anyway.

If you find happiness, people may be jealous. Be happy anyway.

The good you do today may be forgotten tomorrow. Do good anyway.

Give the world the best you have and it may never be enough. Give your best anyway.

For you see, in the end, it is between you and God. It was never between you and them anyway."
— Mother Teresa

"I know God won't give me anything I can't handle. I just wish he didn't trust me so much."
— Mother Teresa

"It is Jesus that you seek when you dream of happiness; He is waiting for you when nothing else you find satisfies you; He is the beauty to which you are so attracted; it is He who provoked you with that thirst for fullness that will not let you settle for compromise; it is He who urges you to shed the masks of a false life; it is He who reads in your heart your most genuine choices, the choices that others try to stifle.

It is Jesus who stirs in you the desire to do something great with your lives, the will to follow an ideal, the refusal to allow yourselves to be ground down by mediocrity, the courage to commit yourselves humbly and patiently to improving yourselves and society, makng the world more human and more fraternal."
— Pope John Paul II (Karol Wojtyła)

" If Jesus had been killed twenty years ago, Catholic school children would be wearing little electric chairs around their necks instead of crosses.
"
— Lenny Bruce

"It is theologically and anthropologically important for woman to be at the center of Christianity. Through Mary, and the other holy women, the feminine element stands at the heart of the Christian religion."
— Pope Benedict XVI

"The Catholic Church is like a thick steak, a glass of red wine, and a good cigar."
— G.K. Chesterton

"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 (The Sacrament of Charity: Sacramentum Caritatis)

"He was alone in his wonderment,
amoung creatures incapable of wonder
--for them it was enough to exist and go their way."
— Pope John Paul II (Karol Wojtyła)

"...all that is carried along
by the stream's silvery cascade,
rhythmically falling from the mountain,
carried by its own current--
carried where?"
— Pope John Paul II (Karol Wojtyła)

"To know much and taste nothing-of what use is that?"
— St. Bonaventure

"'I know one thing you don't. I know the difference between Right and Wrong. They didn't teach you that at school.'
Rose didn't answer; the woman was quite right: the two words meant nothing to her. Their taste was extinguished by stronger foods--Good and Evil."
— Graham Greene (Brighton Rock)

"We are all born like Catholics . . . in limbo, without religion."
— Yann Martel (Life of Pi)

"The father of Egyptology was Father Athanasius Kircher."
— Thomas E. Woods Jr.

"Heaven forbid that we should believe in such a way as not to accept or seek reasons, since we could not even believe if we did not possess rational souls."
— Augustine of Hippo

"Father Nicholas Steno, is often identified as the father of geology."
— Thomas E. Woods Jr.

"The first person to measure the rate of acceleration of a free falling body was Father Giambattista Riccioli."
— Thomas E. Woods Jr.

"Father Roger Boscovich is often credited as the father of modern atomic theory."
— Thomas E. Woods Jr.

"Jesuits so dominated the study of earthquakes that seismology became known as 'the Jesuit Science.'"
— Thomas E. Woods Jr.

"Thirty-five craters on the moon are named for Jesuit scientists and mathematicians. "
— Thomas E. Woods Jr.

"It was Francisco de Vitoria, a Catholic priest and professor, who earned the title of father of international law."
— Thomas E. Woods Jr.

"The idea of formulated 'rights ... comes not from John Locke and Thomas Jefferson ... but from the canon law of the Catholic Church. "
— Thomas E. Woods Jr.

"Churchmen sought to introduce rational trial procedures and sophisticated legal principles in place of the superstition-based trial by ordeal that had characterized the Germanic legal order."
— Thomas E. Woods Jr.

"What obliged her to put her faith in a foreign religion. Catholic, universal, what you will, the problem remains: Catholicism springs from the Western world. Even to understand it is European. It is supported by Europe's institutions, and one can love it only by enrolling oneself in the history of a civilization."
— V Y Mudimbe

"The exaltation of human reason and its capabilities, a commitment to rigorous and rational debate, a promotion of intellectual inquiry and scholarly exchange--all sponsored by the Church--provided the framework for the Scientific Revolution."
— Thomas E. Woods Jr.

"The university system, a gift of Western civilization to the world, was developed by the Catholic Church."
— Thomas E. Woods Jr.

"... You can't be with God and be neutral. / True contemplation is resistance. And poetry, / gazing at clouds is resistance I found out in jail.
"
— Ernesto Cardenal (Zero hour and other documentary poems)

"... It seems to me / the the great bards of the 20th century are in Publicity / those Keatses and Shelleys singing the Colgate smile / Cosmic Coca-Cola, the pause the refreshes, / the make of car that will take us to the land of happiness."
— Ernesto Cardenal (Zero hour and other documentary poems)

"LIFE IS SUBVERSIVE"
— Ernesto Cardenal (Zero hour and other documentary poems)

"(Catholic) monks taught metallurgy, introduced new crops, copied ancient texts, preserved literacy, pioneered in technology, invented champagne, improved the European landscape, provided for wanderers of every stripe, and looked after the lost and shipwrecked."
— Thomas E. Woods Jr.

"“Manifest in this trade (commercial sale of indulgences via bankers) at the same time was a pernicious tendency in the Roman Catholic system, for the trade in indulgences was not an excess or an abuse but the direct consequence of the nomistic degradation of the gospel. That the Reformation started with Luther’s protest against this traffic in indulgences proves its religious origin and evangelical character. At issue here was nothing less than the essential character of the gospel, the core of Christianity, the nature of true piety. And Luther was the man who, guided by experience in the life of his own soul, again made people understand the original and true meaning of the gospel of Christ. Like the “righteousness of God,” so the term “penitence” had been for him one of the most bitter words of Holy Scripture. But when from Romans 1:17 he learned to know a “righteousness by faith,” he also learned “the true manner of penitence.” He then understood that the repentance demanded in Matthew 4:17 had nothing to do with the works of satisfaction required in the Roman institution of confession, but consisted in “a change of mind in true interior contrition” and with all its benefits was itself a fruit of grace. In the first seven of his ninety-five theses and further in his sermon on “Indulgences and Grace” (February 1518), the sermon on “Penitence” (March 1518), and the sermon on the “Sacrament of Penance” (1519), he set forth this meaning of repentance or conversion and developed the glorious thought that the most important part of penitence consists not in private confession (which cannot be found in Scripture) nor in satisfaction (for God forgives sins freely) but in true sorrow over sin, in a solemn resolve to bear the cross of Christ, in a new life, and in the word of absolution, that is, the word of the grace of God in Christ. The penitent arrives at forgiveness of sins, not by making amends (satisfaction) and priestly absolution, but by trusting the word of God, by believing in God’s grace. It is not the sacrament but faith that justifies. In that way Luther came to again put sin and grace in the center of the Christian doctrine of salvation. The forgiveness of sins, that is, justification, does not depend on repentance, which always remains incomplete, but rests in God’s promise and becomes ours by faith alone.”"
— Herman Bavinck