It is important for everyone, in fact, to learn ever better how to “remain” with the Lord daily in personal encounters to allow his love to take hold of them and to be proclaimers of the Gospel. It is important to seek to live one’s life generously, not according to one’s own plan, but to the one God has for each of us, conforming our own will to the Lord’s; it is important to be prepared, also through serious and committed study, to serve the People of God in the tasks which will be entrusted to them.

- Homily, 4 November 2011

In our prayer too we must learn, increasingly, to enter this history of salvation of which Jesus is the summit, to renew before God our personal decision to open ourselves to his will, to ask him for the strength to conform our will to his will, throughout our life, in obedience to his design of love for us.

- General Audience Address, 30 November 2011

The Mass invites us to discern what, in ourselves, is obedient to the Spirit of God and what, in ourselves, is attuned to the spirit of evil. In the Mass, we want to belong only to Christ and we take up with gratitude – with thanksgiving – the cry of the psalmist: “How shall I repay the Lord for his goodness to me?” (Ps 116:12).

- Homily, 13 September 2008

...when we continually encounter the sacred it risks becoming habitual for us. In this way, reverential fear is extinguished. Conditioned by all our habits we no longer perceive the great, new and surprising fact that he himself is present, speaks to us, gives himself to us. We must ceaselessly struggle against this becoming accustomed to the extraordinary reality, against the indifference of the heart, always recognizing our insufficiency anew and the grace that there is in the fact that he consigned himself into our hands. To serve means to draw near, but above all it also means obedience.

- Homily, 20 March 2008

It is only by walking with the Lord, by abandoning myself to his openness in the communion of the Church and not by living for myself - either for a happy earthly life or even only for personal bliss - but by making myself an instrument of his peace that I live well and learn this courage in the face of today's ever new and serious, sometimes almost impossible, challenges.

- Address to the Clergy of Rome, 7 February 2008

This is true Christian obedience, which is freedom: not as I want, with my own plan of life for myself, but in putting myself at his disposal so that he will make use of me. And in placing myself in his hands I am free. But it is a great leap that is never made once and for all.

- Address to the Clergy of Rome, 7 February 2008

As it did then, evangelization today also demands total and faithful adherence to God's Word, adherence to Christ first of all and attentive listening to his Spirit who guides the Church, docile obedience to the Pastors whom God has chosen to guide his people and prudent, frank dialogue with the social, cultural and religious bodies of our time. All this presupposes, as is well known, close communion with the one who calls us to be his friends and disciples, a unity of life and action nourished by listening to his Word, by contemplation and by prayer, by detachment from the mindset of the world and by ceaseless conversion to his love so that it may be he, Christ, who lives and works in each one of us. Here lies the secret of the authentic success of every Christian's apostolic and missionary commitment, and especially of those who are called to a more direct service of the Gospel.

- Letter to Fr. Peter-Hans Kolvenbach, S.J., 10 January 2008