Philosophy Quote by Pope John Paul II — Inspiring Words on Life, Love & Wisdom

“The ethos of redemption is realied in self-mastery, by means of temperance, that is, continence of desires.”

“Take away from love the fullness of self surrender, the completeness of personal commitment, and what remains will be a total denial and negation of it.”

“In suffocating the voice of conscience, passion carries with itself a restlessness of the body and the senses: it is the restlessness of the "external man." When the internal man has been reduced to silence, then passion, once it has been given freedom of action, so to speak, exhibits itself as an insistent tendency to satisfy the senses and the body.”

“...if desire is predominant it can deform love between man and woman and rob them both of it.”

“Friendship, as has been said, consists in a full commitment of the will to another person with a view to that person's good.”

“Faith and Reason are like two wings of the human spirit by which it soars to the truth.”

“Le Corbusier was the sort of relentlessly rational intellectual that only France loves wholeheartedly, the logician who flies higher and higher in ever-decreasing concentric circles until, with one last, utterly inevitable induction, he disappears up his own fundamental aperture and emerges in the fourth dimension as a needle-thin umber bird.”

“During periods of root expansion things have always looked as confused and topsy-turvy and purposeless as they do now. The whole Renaissance is supposed to have resulted from the topsy-turvy feeling caused by Columbus’ discovery of a new world. It just shook people up. The topsy-turviness of that time is recorded everywhere. There was nothing in the flat-earth views of the Old and New Testaments that predicted it. Yet people couldn’t deny it. The only way they could assimilate it was to abandon the entire medieval outlook and enter into a new expansion of reason.”

“The road ahead is long and there will be many setbacks. Success is not assured… but the price of failure has never been this high.”

“Our knowledge of circumstances has increased, but our uncertainty, instead of having diminished, has only increased. The reason of this is, that we do not gain all our experience at once, but by degrees; so our determinations continue to be assailed incessantly by fresh experience; and the mind, if we may use the expression, must always be under arms.”