Daily Inspiration Quote by Pope Paul VI

Power, Pope Paul VI suggests, is often borrowed, not hoarded. "Nothing makes one feel so strong as a call for help" flips the usual script in which strength means self-sufficiency and help is a confession of weakness. The paradox works because it names a psychological jolt: being needed can stiffen the spine. A request drags you out of private doubt and assigns you a role with stakes. In that moment, strength feels less like an inner resource and more like a moral summons.

The subtext is quietly pastoral. As a clergyman leading a global church through the Second Vatican Council's upheavals and the cold, crowded anxieties of the 1960s and 70s, Paul VI lived inside the tension between spiritual authority and human fragility. A "call for help" is also what the Church claims to hear: the cry of the poor, the lonely, the war-torn. The line reframes that cry not as a burden but as grace, a way the world recruits your better self. It hints at vocation: you discover what you can carry only when someone hands you something heavy.

There's also a subtle warning embedded in the uplift. If strength is most vivid when others depend on you, it's easy to become addicted to indispensability, to confuse being necessary with being righteous. Paul VI's phrasing keeps it balanced: the strength is a feeling, triggered by responsibility, not proof of superiority. It asks you to answer the call without turning it into a mirror.