Quotes on Hope

"One is entitled to think that the future of humanity is in the hands of those who are capable of providing the generations to come with reasons for life and optimism."

The Catechism of the Catholic Church, #1917
"Faith, hope and charity go together. Hope is practiced through the virtue of patience, which continues to do good even in the face of apparent failure, and through the virtue of humility, which accepts God's mystery and trusts him even at times of darkness."

Pope Benedict XVI, Deus Caritas Est (Encyclical on Love)

"Only when the future is certain as a positive reality does it become possible to live the present as well. So now we can say: Christianity was not only 'good news' - the communication of a hitherto unknown content. In our language we would say: the Christian message was not only 'informative' but 'performative'. That means: the Gospel is not merely a communication of things that can be known - it is one that makes things happen and is life-changing. The dark door of time, of the future, has been thrown open. The one who has hope lives differently; the one who hopes has been granted the gift of a new life."

Pope Benedict XVI, Spe Salvi (Encyclical On Hope)


“To have Christian hope means to know about evil and yet to go to meet the future with confidence. The core of faith rests upon accepting being loved by God, and therefore to believe is to say Yes, not only to him, but to creation, to creatures, above all, to men, to try to see the image of God in each person and thereby to become a lover. That’s not easy, but the basic Yes, the conviction that God has created men, that he stands behind them, that they aren’t simply negative, gives love a reference point that enables it to ground hope on the basis of faith.”

Cardinal Ratzinger, Salt of the Earth

"Hope is something that is demanded of us; it is not, then, a mere reasoned calculation of our chances. Nor is it merely the bubbling up of a sanguine temperament; if it is demanded of us, it lies not in the temperament but in the will... Hoping for what? For deliverance from persecution, for immunity from plague, pestilence and famine...? No, for the grace of persevering in his Christian profession, and for the consequent achievement of a happy immortality. Strictly speaking, then, the highest exercise of hope, supernaturally speaking, is to hope for perseverance and for Heaven when it looks, when it feels, as if you were going to lose both one and the other."

Fr. Ronald Knox, God and the Atom

"Because the Pope is a witness of Christ and a minister of the Good News, he is a man of joy and a man of hope, a man of the fundamental affirmation of the value of existence, the value of creation and of hope in the future life. Naturally, this is neither a naive joy, nor a vain hope. The joy of victory over evil does not obfuscate - it actually intensifies - the realistic awareness of the existence of evil in the world and in every man. The Gospel teaches us to call good and evil by name, but it also teaches: "Do not be conquered by evil but conquer evil with good."

Pope John Paul II, Crossing the Threshold of Hope

"The Christian is certainly bound both by need and by duty to struggle with evil through many afflictions and to suffer death; but, as one who has been made a partner in the Paschal Mystery, and as one who has been configured to the death of Christ, he will go forward, strengthened by hope, to the resurrection."

Pope John Paul II, Memory and Identity

"But in truly great trials, where I must make a definitive decision to place the truth before my own welfare, career, and possessions, I need the certitude of that true, great hope of which we have spoken here. For this too we need witnesses - martyrs - who have given themselves totally, so as to show us the way - day after day. We need them if we are to prefer goodness to comfort, even in the little choices we face each day - knowing that this is how we live life to the full. Let us say it once again: the capacity to suffer for the sake of truth is the measure of humanity. Yet this capacity to suffer depends on the type and extent of the hope that we bear within us and build upon. The saints were able to make the great journey of human existence in the way that Christ had done before them, because they were brimming with great hope."

Pope Benedict XVI, Spe Salvi 

"Despair will never be ours if we believe in the power of the sacrament of Penance and tap into it very often. This sacrament helps us avoid both extremes - the presumption of the Pharisees and the despair of Judas - and it keeps us, with St. Peter, int he healthy center. Contrite? Yes, but confident in the Lord’s mercy. Aware of the sin? You bet, but equally aware of Christ’s desire to forgive. Repentant? You bet, but renewed as well. And for us, this moment of honesty and healing takes place, concretely and personally, in the sacrament of Penance."

Archbishop Timothy Dolan, To Whom Shall We Go