Some Meaningful Quotes from TOB

1. For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh. This is a great mystery, and I mean in reference to Christ and the church. (Eph 5:31-31)

2. The body, in fact, and only the body is capable of making visible what is invisible: the spiritual and the divine. It has been created to transfer into the visible reality of the world the mystery hidden from eternity in God, and thus to be a sign of it. (TOB 19:4)

3. God has revealed his innermost secret: God himself is an eternal exchange of love, Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit, and he has destined us to share in the exchange. (CCC 221)

4. Jesus Christ, the final Adam, by the revelation of the mystery of the Father and his love fully reveals man to himself and makes his supreme calling clear. (GS 22)

5. Man can fully discover his true self only in a sincere giving of himself. (GS 24)

6. The spousal meaning of the body is the body’s power to express love: precisely that love in which the human person becomes a gift and through this gift, fulfills the very meaning of his being and existence (TOB 15:1), and is the fundamental component of human existence in the world. (TOB 15:5)

7. The words of Christ re-activate that deepest heritage of our hearts, giving it real power in our lives. (TOB 46:6)

8. The Spirit of the Lord gives new form to our desires, those inner movements that animate our lives. (CCC 2764)

9. Christian ethos is characterized by a transformation of the human person’s conscience and attitudes … such as to express the value of the body and sex according to the Creator’s original plan. (TOB 45:3)

10. The new dimension of ethos is always connected with the heart’s liberation from lust. (TOB 43:6)

11. The Law of the Gospel proceeds to reform the heart, the root of human acts, where man chooses between the pure and the impure. (CCC 1968)

12. As we open ourselves to this gift, the grace of redemption begins to re-vivify our humanity, to enliven our hearts with God’s own goodness. To the degree that we allow this grace to inform and transform us, the Holy Spirit impregnates our reciprocal relations with everything that is noble and beautiful, with the supreme value which is love. (TOB 46:5) 13. Redemption is a truth, a reality, in the name of which man must feel himself called, and called with effectiveness. He must become aware of this call also through Christ’s words according to Mt 5:27-28, reread in the full context of the revelation of the body. Man must feel himself called to rediscover, or even better, to realize, the spousal meaning of the body and to express in this way the interior freedom of the gift, that is, the freedom of that spiritual state and power that derive from mastery over the concupiscence of the flesh.

14. To grow in purity, we must devote ourselves to a progressive education in self-control of the will, of sentiments, of emotions, which must be developed from the simplest gestures, in which it is relatively easy to put the inner decision into practice. (TOB 128:1)

15: As we mature in self-control, we experience it as the ability to orient sexual reactions, both as to their content and to their character. (TOB 129:5)

16. The man who is truly master of himself is able to direct erotic desire toward what is true, good and beautiful, so that what is erotic also becomes true , good, and beautiful. (TOB 48:1)

17. Because human beings, by their own fault, have forgotten God, for this reason God abandoned them to impurity according to the desires of their hearts (Rom !;24), from which comes also the whole moral disorder that deforms both sexual life and the functioning of social, economic and even cultural life. (TOB 51:1)

18. Those who seek fulfillment … are called first of all to make of this ‘theology of the body’ … the content of their lives and behavior. At root they are called to a deepened consciousness of the meaning of the body, in its masculinity and femininity … an accurate consciousness of its spousal meaning, of its generative meaning. (TOB 23:5)