Pope Benedict XVI Quotes

Our Catholic schools exist to help young people attain holiness in their lives, that is, to become saints.

By offering an education centered on values, the faculty in Catholic schools can create an interactive setting between parents and students that is geared toward long-term healthy character and scholastic development for all enrolled children.

Catholic education aims not only to communicate facts but also to transmit a coherent, comprehensive vision of life, in the conviction that the truths contained in that vision liberate students in the most profound meaning of human freedom.

Catholic schools prepare every student to meet the challenges of their future by developing their mind, yes, but also their body and their soul and spirit.

A Christian school should be a place where young men and young women go through a period of spiritual formation and development so that they come out incredibly more proficient at living out their calling than they would have been had they not gone to school.

Spiritual formation is character formation. Everyone gets a spiritual formation. It's like education. Everyone gets an education; it's just a matter of which one you get.

I commend the parents who are sending their children to a Catholic school, because they're making a sacrifice, and they're paying twice for their child's education: They're paying the tuition, and they're paying taxes.

Education is soul crafting.

In judging our progress as individuals we tend to concentrate on external factors such as one's social position, influence and popularity, wealth and standard of education... But internal factors may be even more crucial in assessing one's development as a human being. Honesty, sincerity, simplicity, humility, pure generosity, absence of vanity, readiness to serve others - qualities which are within easy reach of every soul - are the foundation of one's spiritual life.

A doctrine-teaching, character-building university, the Brigham Young University is dedicated to the building of character and faith, for character is higher than intellect . . . . We are men of God first, men of letters second, men of science third, and noted men fourth, men of rectitude rather than academic competence. . . . Our academic training must be as impeccable as our lives.

All good qualities must be sown and cultivated. We can’t expect to change overnight from an ordinary person into one with high realizations.

They tried to make me go to Catholic school, too. I lasted a very short time. When the penguin came after me with a ruler, I was out of there.

The goal of the pastor is not to get people to show up but to get people to grow up.

God is more interested in your character than your comfort. God is more interested in making your life holy than He is in making your life happy.

I give priority to up-bringing over education because the ultimate goal of up-bringing is morals, and we have a more urgent need for morals than for knowledge.

True education does not consist merely in the acquiring of a few facts of science, history, literature, or art, but in the development of character.

In our family, at this point,[Sunday School] its not a choice for my kids. It's a duty for us as parents to give them faith as a foundation and hope that when they bemuse older teens and young adults they will choose the same thing for themselves.

It is we ourselves that we have to think about, no one else. That is the way the saints worked. They paid attention to what they were doing, and if others were attracted to them by their enterprise, why, well and good. But they looked to themselves first of all.

Am I getting nobler, better, more helpful, more humble, as I get older? Am I exhibiting the life that men take knowledge of as having been with Jesus, or am I getting more self-assertive, more deliberately determined to have my own way? It is a great thing to tell yourself the truth.

By education, I mean an all-round drawing of the best in child and man in body, mind and spirit.

The superior man honors his virtuous nature, and maintains constant inquiry and study, seeking to carry it out to its breadth and greatness, so as to omit none of the more exquisite and minute points which it embraces, and to raise it to its greatest height and brilliancy.

Scriptures were written, not to satisfy our curiosity and make us astronomers, but to lead us to God, and make us saints.

The first duty of a university is to teach wisdom, not trade; character, not technicalities.

Intellectual activity is a danger to the building of character.