Pope Benedict XVI Quotes

We need no fanciful teaching regarding the personality of God. What God desires us to know of Him is revealed in His word and His works. The beautiful things of nature reveal His character and His power as Creator.

The Bible nowhere enters into an argument to prove the person and being of God. It assumes His being and reveals His person and character.

My message is that God is a good God.

We can only know one thing about God - that he is what we are not. Our wretchedness alone is an image of this. The more we contemplate it, the more we contemplate him.

Catholics should be proselytizing about a God who is love, who represents a hereafter where there's no hell, who wants you to lead a life where you can confess your sins and feel much better afterwards. Those are lovely concepts of God.

Jesus is not only the Son of God, but He is God Himself. Having all power in His hands, He laid down His life for people who deserved God's justice, not His mercy.

The all-seeing eye of God beheld our deplorable state; infinite pity touched the heart of the Father of mercies; and infinite wisdom laid the plan of our recovery.

God, to redeem us at the deepest portion of our nature - the urge to love and be loved - must reveal His nature in an incredible and impossible way. He must reveal it at a cross.

Isn't it interesting that God appears holy when he's gracious?

If we can find God only as he is revealed in nature we have no moral God.

This idea of compassion comes to us because we're made in the image of God, who is ultimately the compassionate one.

Our Heavenly Father knows us and our circumstances and even what faces us in the future. His Beloved Son, Jesus Christ, our Savior, has suffered and paid for our sins and those of all the people we will ever meet. He has perfect understanding of the feelings, the suffering, the trials, and the needs of every individual.

A religious awakening which does not awaken the sleeper to love has roused him in vain.

Subtle is the Lord, but malicious He is not.

God loves to show mercy . . . His anger must be released by a stiff safety lock, but His mercy has a hair trigger.

Jesus didn't go around condemning people. The Bible says it's the goodness of God that leads people to repentance.

Christ did not die to make his Father loving, but because his Father is loving: the atoning blood is the outflow of the very heart of God toward us.

T'was a thief said the last kind word to Christ. Christ took the kindness and forgave the theft.

If love could force my own thoughts over the edge of the world and out of time, then could I not see how even divine omnipotence might by the force of its own love be swayed down to the world? ...how it might, because it could know its own creatures only by compassion, put on mortal flesh, become a man, and walk among us, assume our nature and our fate, suffer our faults and our death?

Jesus loves sinners. He only loves sinners. He has never turned anyone away who came to Him for forgiveness, and He died on the cross for sinners, not for respectable people.

The gospel is a gospel of giving and forgiving.

The love for our enemies takes us along the way of the cross and into fellowship with the Crucified. The more we are driven along this road, the more certain is the victory of love over the enemy's hatred. For then it is not the disciple's own love, but the love of Jesus Christ alone, who for the sake of his enemies went to the cross and prayed for them as he hung there.

If our perfect Lord is gracious enough to take our worst, and ugliest, our most boring, our least successful, and forgive them, burying them in the depths of the sea, then it's high time we give each other a break.

Though our Savior's passion is over, his compassion is not.

... me He now delights to spare.