The Pope Benedict XVI Reader Quotes

“Only by suffering himself and by becoming free of the tyranny of egotism through suffering does man find himself, his truth, his joy, his happiness”
― Pope Benedict XVI, The Pope Benedict XVI Reader

“Beauty is the radiance of truth, Thomas Aquinas once said, and one might add that the distortion of the beautiful is the self-irony of lost truth.”
― Pope Benedict XVI, The Pope Benedict XVI Reader

“We are led to believe that one can become a human being without conquering oneself, without the patience of renunciation and the toil of overcoming oneself; that there is no need to withstand the hardship of perseverance or to endure patiently the tension between what man ought to be and what he is in fact: this is the very essence of the crisis of the hour.”
― Pope Benedict XVI, The Pope Benedict XVI Reader

“Thus we can say: the Church is there so that God, the living God, may be made known—so that man may learn to live with God, live in his sight and in fellowship with him. The Church is there to prevent the advance of hell upon earth and to make the earth fit to live in through the light of God.”
― Pope Benedict XVI, The Pope Benedict XVI Reader

“When God inflicts punishment, this is not punishment in the sense that God has, as it were, drawn up a system of fines and penalties and is wanting to pin one on you. “The punishment of God” is in fact an expression for having missed the right road and then experiencing the consequences that follow from taking the wrong track and wandering away from the right way of living.”
― Pope Benedict XVI, The Pope Benedict XVI Reader

“Loneliness is indubitably one of the basic roots from which man’s encounter with God has risen. Where man experiences his solitariness, he experiences at the same time how much his whole existence is a cry for the “You” and how ill-adapted he is to be only an “I” in himself. This loneliness can become apparent to man on various levels. To start with, it can be comforted by the discovery of a human “You.” But then there is the paradox that, as Claudel says, every “You” found by man finally turns out to be an unfulfilled and unfulfillable promise; that every “You” is at bottom another disappointment and that there comes a point when no encounter can surmount the final loneliness: the very process of finding and of having found thus becomes a pointer back to the loneliness, a call to the absolute “You” that really descends into the depths of one’s own “I.”
― Pope Benedict XVI, The Pope Benedict XVI Reader