70+ Inspirational, Biblical And Motivational Catholic Quotes

It is jesus that you seek when you dream of happiness; he is waiting for you when nothing else you find satisfies you; he is the beauty to which you are so attracted; it is he who provoked you with that thirst for fullness that will not let you settle for compromise; it is he who urges you to shed the masks of a false life; it is he who reads in your heart your most genuine choices, the choices that others try to stifle.

it is jesus who stirs in you the desire to do something great with your lives, the will to follow an ideal, the refusal to allow yourselves to be ground down by mediocrity, the courage to commit yourselves humbly and patiently to improving yourselves and society, making the world more human and more fraternal.

Too many people get credit for being good, when they are only being passive. They are too often praised for being broadminded when they are so broadminded they can never make up their minds about anything.

I am a Catholic, not so committed to the church, but to the idea of the Virgin, the female face of God.

If I were a Roman Catholic, I should turn a heretic, in sheer desperation, because I would rather go to heaven than go to purgatory.

There must be must be a first mover existing above all – and this we call god.

Since many of you do not belong to the Catholic Church and others are non-believers, from the bottom of my heart I give this silent blessing to each and every one of you, respecting the conscience of each one of you but knowing that each one of you is a child of God.

It is immoral to brand children with religion. ‘This is a Catholic child.’ ‘That is a Muslim child.’ I want everyone to flinch when they hear such a phrase, just as they would if they heard, ‘That is a Marxist child.’

If you don’t behave as you believe, you will end by believing as you behave.

The truth of our faith becomes a matter of ridicule among the infidels if any Catholic, not gifted with the necessary scientific learning, presents as dogma what scientific scrutiny shows to be false.

Let nothing disturb you,
let nothing frighten you,
all things are passing away:
god never changes.
patience obtains all things.
whoever has god lacks nothing;
god alone suffices.

The church is a perpetually defeated thing that always outlives her conquerers.

It is theologically and anthropologically important for woman to be at the center of christianity. Through mary, and the other holy women, the feminine element stands at the heart of the christian religion.

The road must be trod, but it will be very hard. And neither strength nor wisdom will carry us far upon it. This quest may be attempted by the weak with as much hope as the strong. Yet it is oft the course of deeds that move the wheels of the world: small hands do them because they must, while the eyes of the great are elsewhere.

Making your dad happy is – especially for an Italian Catholic girl, I’ll tell you – it feels really good.

What you are is god’s gift to you, what you become is your gift to god.

I am not the Catholic candidate for President. I am the Democratic Party’s candidate for President, who happens also to be a Catholic.

I am a Catholic.

What is the good of words if they aren’t important enough to quarrel over? why do we choose one word more than another if there isn’t any difference between them? if you called a woman a chimpanzee instead of an angel, wouldn’t there be a quarrel about a word? if you’re not going to argue about words, what are you going to argue about? are you going to convey your meaning to me by moving your ears? the church and the heresies always used to fight about words, because they are the only thing worth fighting about.

The heart is like a woman, and the head is like a man, and although man is the head of woman, woman is the heart of man, and she turns man’s head because she turns his heart.

I mean, I went to a Catholic boys’ school for a year, but that was to play hockey. Religion class was quite contentious for me.

A good Catholic meddles in politics, offering the best of himself, so that those who govern can govern. But what is the best that we can offer to those who govern? Prayer!

An armchair Jungian would say the whole thing is about my own ongoing spiritual search. My interior life has always been one of trying to find a spiritual link, maybe because I’m from a family of separate religious philosophies: Protestant and Catholic.

Babies need not to be taught a trade, but to be introduced to a world. To put the matter shortly, woman is generally shut up in a house with a human being at the time when he asks all the questions that there are, and some that there aren’t. It would be odd if she retained any of the narrowness of a specialist. Now if anyone says that this duty of general enlightenment (even when freed from modern rules and hours, and exercised more spontaneously by a more protected person) is in itself too exacting and oppressive, I can understand the view. I can only answer that our race has thought it worth while to cast this burden on women in order to keep common-sense in the world. But when people begin to talk about this domestic duty as not merely difficult but trivial and dreary, I simply give up the question. For I cannot with the utmost energy of imagination conceive what they mean. When domesticity, for instance, is called drudgery, all the difficulty arises from a double meaning in the word. If drudgery only means dreadfully hard work, I admit the woman drudges in the home, as a man might drudge at the cathedral of amiens or drudge behind a gun at trafalgar. But if it means that the hard work is more heavy because it is trifling, colorless and of small import to the soul, then as I say, I give it up; I do not know what the words mean. To be queen elizabeth within a definite area, deciding sales, banquets, labors and holidays; to be whiteley within a certain area, providing toys, boots, sheets, cakes. And books, to be aristotle within a certain area, teaching morals, manners, theology, and hygiene; I can understand how this might exhaust the mind, but I cannot imagine how it could narrow it. How can it be a large career to tell other people’s children about the rule of three, and a small career to tell one’s own children about the universe? how can it be broad to be the same thing to everyone, and narrow to be everything to someone? no; a woman’s function is laborious, but because it is gigantic, not because it is minute. I will pity mrs. Jones for the hugeness of her task; I will never pity her for its smallness.

I was raised a Catholic on both sides of the family. I went to a Catholic grade school and thought everybody in the country was Catholic, because that’s all I ever was associated with.

To be Catholic is the only way of being fully and utterly Christian.

Once you have surrendered yourself, you make yourself receptive. In receiving from god, you are perfected and completed.

I believe in God – not in a Catholic God; there is no Catholic God. There is God, and I believe in Jesus Christ, his incarnation. Jesus is my teacher and my pastor, but God, the Father, Abba, is the light and the Creator. This is my Being.

If I should say anything that is not in conformity with what is held by the Holy Roman Catholic Church, it will be through ignorance and not through malice. This may be taken as certain, and also that, through God’s goodness, I am, and shall always be, as I always have been, subject to her.

My mother was Catholic, my father was Protestant. There was always a debate going on at home – I think in those days we called them arguments – about who was right and who was wrong.

I’m in awe of the universe, but I don’t necessarily believe there’s an intelligence or agent behind it. I do have a passion for the visual in religious rituals, though, even though they may be completely empty and bereft of substance. The incense is powerful and provocative, whether Buddhist or Catholic.

The most total opposite of pleasure is not pain but boredom, for we are willing to risk pain to make a boring life interesting.

In the Western Church to which I belong, priests cannot be married as in the Byzantine, Ukrainian, Russian or Greek Catholic Churches. In those churches, the priests can be married, but the bishops have to be celibate. They are very good priests.

I do disapprove very strongly of labelling children, especially young children, as something like ‘Catholic children’ or ‘Protestant children’ or ‘Islamic children.’

[said during a debate when his opponent asserted that atheism and belief in evolution lead to nazism:]

atheism by itself is, of course, not a moral position or a political one of any kind; it simply is the refusal to believe in a supernatural dimension. For you to say of nazism that it was the implementation of the work of charles darwin is a filthy slander, undeserving of you and an insult to this audience. Darwin’s thought was not taught in germany; darwinism was so derided in germany along with every other form of unbelief that all the great modern atheists, darwin, einstein and freud were alike despised by the national socialist regime.

now, just to take the most notorious of the 20th century totalitarianisms – the most finished example, the most perfected one, the most ruthless and refined one: that of national socialism, the one that fortunately allowed the escape of all these great atheists, thinkers and many others, to the united states, a country of separation of church and state, that gave them welcome – if it’s an atheistic regime, then how come that in the first chapter of mein kampf, that hitler says that he’s doing god’s work and executing god’s will in destroying the jewish people? how come the fuhrer oath that every officer of the party and the army had to take, making hitler into a minor god, begins, “i swear in the name of almighty god, my loyalty to the fuhrer?” how come that on the belt buckle of every nazi soldier it says gott mit uns, god on our side? how come that the first treaty made by the nationalist socialist dictatorship, the very first is with the vatican? it’s exchanging political control of germany for catholic control of german education. How come that the church has celebrated the birthday of the fuhrer every year, on that day until democracy put an end to this filthy, quasi-religious, superstitious, barbarous, reactionary system?

again, this is not a difference of emphasis between us. To suggest that there’s something fascistic about me and about my beliefs is something I won’t hear said and you shouldn’t believe.

Hearing nuns’ confessions is like being stoned to death with popcorn.

When I was fourteen, Mom and Dad sent me to St. Joseph High School, the Catholic school up the hill from our place, housed in a 1950s-era tan brick building sometimes confused for a light industrial structure due to the surprisingly high smokestack of its old incinerator.

Eomer said, ‘how is a man to judge what to do in such times?’
as he has ever judged,’ said aragorn. ‘good and evil have not changed since yesteryear, nor are they one thing among elves and another among men. It is a man’s part to discern them, as much in the golden wood as in his own house.

I am the Democratic Party’s candidate for president who happens also to be a Catholic. I do not speak for my church on public matters – and the church does not speak for me.

This is the secret of life: the self lives only by dying, finds its identity (and its happiness) only by self-forgetfulness, self-giving, self-sacrifice, and agape love.

The catholic church is like a thick steak, a glass of red wine, and a good cigar.

It is now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy by a resort to mathematics, though she is still forbidden to resort to physics or chemistry.

One cannot really be a Catholic and grown up.

If jesus had been killed twenty years ago, catholic school children would be wearing little electric chairs around their necks instead of crosses.

The Catholic and the Communist are alike in assuming that an opponent cannot be both honest and intelligent.

The truth is like a lion; you don’t have to defend it. Let it loose; it will defend itself.

Some people, in order to discover god, read books. But there is a great book: the very appearance of created things. Look above you! look below you! read it. God, whom you want to discover, never wrote that book with ink. Instead, he set before your eyes the things that he had made. Can you ask for a louder voice than that?.

It takes three to make love, not two: you, your spouse, and god. Without god people only succeed in bringing out the worst in one another. Lovers who have nothing else to do but love each other soon find there is nothing else. Without a central loyalty life is unfinished.

The facts tell us that no religious Faith releases – or ever has released at any moment in History – a higher degree of warmth, a more intense dynamism of unification than the Christianity of our own day – and the more Catholic it is, the truer my words.

I am a Catholic because I choose to be a Catholic. And then I go to the Mass because I choose. It is out of my free will.

We sinned for no reason but an incomprehensible lack of love, and he saved us for no reason but an incomprehensible excess of love.

If you believe what you like in the gospel, and reject what you don’t like, it is not the gospel you believe, but yourself.

Miracles are not contrary to nature but only contrary to what we know about nature.

God has created me to do him some definite service. He has committed some work to me which he has not committed to another. I have my mission. I may never know it in this life, but I shall be told it in the next. I am a link in a chain, a bond of connection between persons.

he has not created me for naught. I shall do good; I shall do his work. I shall be an angel of peace, a preacher of truth in my own place, while not intending it if I do but keep his commandments.

therefore, I will trust him, whatever I am, I can never be thrown away. If I am in sickness, my sickness may serve him, in perplexity, my perplexity may serve him. If I am in sorrow, my sorrow may serve him. He does nothing in vain. He knows what he is about. He may take away my friends. He may throw me among strangers. He may make me feel desolate, make my spirits sink, hide my future from me. Still, he knows what he is about.

Where most men work for degrees after their names, we work for one before our names: ‘st.’ it’s a much more difficult degree to attain. It takes a lifetime, and you don’t get your diploma until you’re dead.

When man is with god in awe and love, then he is praying.

Criticism of others is thus an oblique form of self-commendation. We think we make the picture hang straight on our wall by telling our neighbors that all his pictures are crooked.