690 Quotes by Pope Benedict XVI

We are not some casual and meaningless product of evolution. Each of us is the result of a thought of God.

He had only just gone up there at lunchtime when he called me, saying I should come up quickly. When I came up, he had just prayed with his breviary I said: 'Holy Father, you simply must rest now!' 'I can rest in eternity,' he said. I think that is very typical of him: I can reset in eternity. In the present he was always restless. (BXVI regarding JPII).

In the Eucharist a communion takes place that corresponds to the union of man and woman in marriage. Just as they become "one flesh", so in Communion we all become "one spirit", one person, with Christ.

Jesus assumes, as it were, the fall of man, lets himself into man's fallenness, prays to the Father out of the lowest depths of human dereliction and anguish. He lays his will in the will of the Father's: "Not my will but yours be done." He lays the human will in the divine. He takes up all the hesitation of the human will and endures it. It is this very conforming of the human will to the divine that is the heart of redemption.

We throw ourselves down, as Jesus did, before the mystery of God's power present to us, knowing that the Cross is the true burning bush, the place of the flame of God's love, which burns but does not destroy.

mIn the Eucharist a communion takes place that corresponds to the union of man and woman in marriage. Just as they become "one flesh", so in Communion we all become "one spirit", one person, with Christ.

In the end, even the “yes” to love is a source of suffering, because love always requires expropriations of my “I”, in which I allow myself to be pruned and wounded. Love simply cannot exist without this painful renunciation of myself, for otherwise it becomes pure selfishness and thereby ceases to be love.

The fundamental human right, the presupposition of every other right, is the right to life itself. This is true of life from the moment of conception until its natural end. Abortion, consequently, cannot be a human right -- it is the very opposite. It is a deep wound in society.

One must be very cautious when using biblical data in systematic theology. The questions which we ask are *our* questions. Our answers must be capable of holding up in biblical terms, but it would be false to treat them as exegetical conclusions because the way we have decided in their favor is that appropriate to systematic thought.