“Faced with problems and disappointments, many people will try to escape from their responsibility: escape in selfishness, escape in sexual pleasure, escape in drugs, escape in violence, escape in indifference and cynical attitudes. But today, I propose to you the option of love, which is the opposite of escape.”
Homily during the Holy Mass on Boston Common in Boston, Massachusetts, on 1 October 1979, during the pope's first apostolic journey to the United States
Source: Libreria Editrice Vaticana http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_ii/homilies/1979/documents/hf_jp-ii_hom_19791001_usa-boston_en.html
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Pope John Paul II 64
264th Pope of the Catholic Church, saint 1920–2005Related quotes
Hays translation
Source: Meditations (c. AD 121–180), Book VII, 71
“You cannot escape the responsibility of tomorrow by evading it today.”
Quoted in Vernon K. McLellan (2000) Wise Words and Quotes
Misattributed
Un Art de Vivre (The Art of Living) (1939), The Art of Happiness
“Forget about what you are escaping from. Reserve your anxiety for what you are escaping to.”
Part I, ch. 2
Variant: "Forget about what you are escaping from," he said, quoting an old maxim of Kornblum's. "Reserve your anxiety for what you are escaping to."
Source: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000)
“There'd been no escape. What did she so desire to escape from?”
Source: The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), Chapter 1
Context: There'd been no escape. What did she so desire to escape from? Such a captive maiden, having plenty of time to think, soon realizes that her tower, its height and architecture, are like her ego only incidental: and what really keeps her where she is is magic, anonymous and malignant, visited upon her from outside and for no reason at all. Having no apparatus except gut fear and female cunning to examine this formless magic, to understand how it works, how to measure its field strength, count its lines of force, she may fall back on superstition, or take up a useful hobby like embroidery, or go mad, or marry a disc jockey. If the tower is everywhere and the knight of deliverance no proof against its magic, what else?
Tradition and the Individual Talent (1919)
Context: The bad poet is usually unconscious where he ought to be conscious, and conscious where he ought to be unconscious. Both errors tend to make him "personal." Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.