Pope Francis Quotes

Stop looking for peace. Give yourselves where you are. Stop looking at yourselves, look instead at your brothers and sisters in need. Ask how you can better love your brothers and sisters. Then you will find peace.

God wants you to live for others and to live that presence well.

Brothers, Fathers and Sisters - all of us in the Missionaries of Charity are doing the same. All of us have been created by God to love and to be loved. We are involved in this work. When you do that, there is joy, unity and love.

At the end of the day, we need to stop thinking about what we can make of ourselves and start thinking more about who God is, what he has done and is doing in Christ for us and for our neighbors, and how he can use us and our fellow brothers and sisters to be instruments of his gift-giving.

...often, stepping outside your comfort zone is not careless irresponsibility, but a necessary act of obedience.

If I can give you any advice, I beg you to get closer to the Eucharist and to Jesus... We must pray to Jesus to give us that tenderness of the Eucharist.

God does not change us in order to love us. He loves us in order to change us.

Practicing charity is the best way to evangelize.

When God transforms the life of just one leader, that leader can transform a church. When one church is transformed, you can transform a community. And when enough churches are thriving, you can affect a region, a country, and eventually the entire world with the positive, life-changing power of Jesus Christ and the redeeming and restoring work of his people.

We must love one another as God loves each one of us. To be able to love, we need a clean heart. Prayer is what gives us a clean heart. The fruit of prayer is a deepening of faith and the fruit of faith is love. The fruit of love is service, which is compassion in action.

Self knowledge puts us on our knees, and it is very necessary for love. For knowledge of God gives love, and knowledge of self gives humility

Growth is a detox process, as our weakest, darkest places are sucked up to the surface in order to be released...often, it is not a change in partners but rather a change in perception that delivers us to the love we seek.

God's love is as objective as light. Because the sun in a sense is light, or the source of light rather than being lit, it really gives its light to the earth. And because the earth really receives light from the sun, it is really transformed every morning from darkness to light. Just as objectively, because God is love, God really gives love to us. And because we receive real life-changing love from God, we are really transformed from darkness to light.

Community always calls us back to solitude, and solitude always calls us to community. Community and solitude, both, are essential elements of ministry and witnessing.

Our problem is not that we're fallen; our problem is we haven't become human yet. The question is, what can make us human, so that we can give life away and give love away and not be grasping after trying to protect our own lives all the time? That's the way I see the Jesus story, and I think it's a powerful and profound story.

Prayer does change things, all kinds of things. But the most important thing it changes is us. As we engage in this communion with God more deeply and come to know the One with whom we are speaking more intimately, that growing knowledge of God reveals to us all the more brilliantly who we are and our need to change in conformity to Him. Prayer changes us profoundly.

Being a sinner does not disqualify you from following Jesus. It's a prerequisite.

My religion is a religion of sharing, not of following

Being for every man the touchstone of faith and love, the Eucharist, like on the Cross, divided the minds as soon as it was announced... Nothing engages a man as much as does the Eucharist

I am quite sure that if we could but once approach the Most Holy Sacrament with great faith and love, it would suffice to make us rich. How much more so if we approach it often!

Prayer frees us to be controlled by God. To pray is to change. There is no greater liberating force in the Christian life than prayer. To enter the gaze of the Holy is never to be the same. To bathe in the Light in quiet wonder and glad surrender is to be slowly, permanently transformed. There is a richer inward orientation, a deep hunger for communion. We feel as if we are being taken over by a new control Center, and so we are.

Jesus said Communion first, community comes out of that, and out of community, ministry.

Lord, how you afflict your lovers! But everything is small in comparison to what you give them afterwards.

Living Holy Week following Jesus means learning how to come out of ourselves to reach out to others, to go to the outskirts of existence, to be the first to move towards our brothers and sisters, especially those who are most distant, those who are forgotten, those who are most in need of understanding, consolation and help. There is so much need to bring the living presence of Jesus, merciful and full of love!