Pope Francis Quotes

If you're in trouble, or hurt or need - go to the poor people. They're the only ones that'll help - the only ones.

Learn to succor the distressed

Whenever I had anything and saw a fellow being suffering, I was more anxious to relieve him than to benefit myself. And this is one of the true secrets of my being a poor man to this day.

In the poor we meet Jesus in his most distressing disguises.

Be close to the poor and to those in need, so as to touch in their flesh the wounded flesh of Jesus. Please, draw near to them!

The world does not have time to be with the poor, to learn with the poor, to listen to the poor. To listen to the poor is an exercise of great discipline, but such listening surely is what is required if charity is not to become a hatred of the poor for being poor.

Anywhere I see suffering, that is where I want to be, doing what I can.

Pure libertarianism believes that people will be generous and help each other. Well, they won't. I wish it were so, and I live that way. I help panhandlers, but other people are, 'Oh look at that - why doesn't he get a job?' While I believe in all that freedom, I also believe that no one should suffer needlessly.

Remember the poor, it costs nothing.

People who are sick, or who have been sick, or have come close to death have a lot to say - and they want you to hear it.

When you walk through the hospital, you waiver between feeling bad for everyone else and feeling bad for yourself. It's a war of the worlds - the healthy and the sick.

The mother's battle for her child with sickness, with poverty, with war, with all the forces of exploitation and callousness that cheapen human life needs to become a common human battle, waged in love and in the passion for survival.

In the beds which the piety of the public has prepared on every side, stricken men await the verdict of fate.

I really connect with those moments of doing missionary work down there and just seeing the people that are dying from disease and hunger and malnutrition.

To see those babies with no food for three of four days, old people sitting in the hot sun, when you see these poor people, you cannot help but being compassionate or affected.

Every merciful act to the needy, the suffering, is as though done to Jesus.

I don't think of myself as doing good works. It's not, 'Oh, I must give these poor people a voice.'

Verdiana was the child of poor though well-born parents, and her knowledge of the sufferings of the poor from her own experience in early years made her ever full of pity for those in need.

Though we cannot relieve all the distressed, we should relieve as many as we can.

We should remember the poor.

Go about absolutely incognito. You must ferret the people out of their hovels as I have done, look into their kettles, eat their bread, loll in their beds under pretense of resting yourself, but in fact to find out if they are soft. You will find a more sublime pleasure … when you shall be able to apply your knowledge to the softening of their beds and the throwing a morsel of meat into their kettles ….

With the poor people of this world I will cast my lot and share their fate.

There is so much indifference in the face of suffering. May we overcome indifference with concrete acts of charity.

Help one another: this is what Jesus teaches us and this what I am doing, and doing with all my heart.

We must see Christ in the disturbing disguise of the poor.