Quotes

Let me respectfully remind you:
Life and Death are of supreme importance.
Time swiftly passes by and opportunity is lost..
Each of us should strive to awaken.
Awaken! Take heed!
Do not squander your life.

— traditional Zen Evening Gatha

The demand for autonomy is typically modern because it is typically adolescent…. we are now about sixteen years old…. It is the most confusing and confused time of life. But if we make it through these years, we may attain a relative maturity in the near future, perhaps in a century or two. [My observation: This relative maturity will depend upon the presence of real “fathers” to whom “we” are willing to listen]

— Peter Kreeft, Wisdom of the Heart

We no longer believe there are any such things as sins against chastity, religion, propriety, piety, bodies, souls, children, marriage, family, gender, sexuality, femininity, masculinity, or common sense, but we are very sensitive to sins against autonomy. [Which leads directly to an explanation for the obsession with a woman’s right to murder her children]

— Peter Kreeft, Wisdom of the Heart

Sloth in the theological sense is one of the very deadliest faults because it is a “No” to God and to what God is; it is a turning away, an ignoring, an active refusal to act for the good; an act (not just a feeling) of “sorrow when faced with great spiritual good.”….

Real religion is a romance with God. The infinite ecstasy of the spiritual marriage comes in the next life, but the courtship (the seeking) and the engagement (Baptism) begin in this life…. Imagine Juliet arriving at Romeo’s house ready to elope with him. Now imagine Romeo saying to her that he is too bored to get out of his room. To add to the irony, imagine that he is mooning over her portrait. That is sloth, and that is us, and that is insanity.

The one most spiritually destructive deadly sin (or vice) of all… is so far from being obvious that we often think of it as a virtue rahter than a vice: our niceness, our politeness, our passionlessness, our sloth…. Every one of us will live forever either in infinite and unimaginable ecstasy or in hopeless misery and despair. If that is not a fact, then atheism is the only sanity and all religion is childish make-believe. If it is a fact, then the only honest and rational response to thjat infinite fact is what Kierkegaard called “infinite passion.” It is not faith, but reason, not sanctity but sanity, that demands nothing less than that. Sloth is irrational, sloth is stupid, sloth is literally insane. Here we are, standing and swaying on the razor edge between two eternal abysses, with fire and darkness on one side and infinite joy and light on the other — and what is our reactin? A yawn. Is that sanity? But the deck chairs are so comfortable here on the Titanic!

There is a gorilla in our house who will not go away. What do we do? How do you hide a gorilla? You cover him up with millions of cute little hamsters, and then spend all your time and attention and thought playing with the hamsters and ignoring the gorilla underneath. If that’s not insanity, what is?

Even within the Church we find a slothful insensitivity to “infinite passion.” For we find even there such an over plus of unctuousness and toadyism towrd “getting along” with our apostate culture that most priests never dare to talk about controversial topics lest they be labeled “fanatics” by the culture (“fanatic” is our culture’s real F-word), “dvisive” by their ecclesiastical superiors, and “judgmental” by both. Only small outlier segments take spiritual warfare literally and seriously. Most of us are not spiritual warriors but spiritual pacifists, quislings. We’re not “the Church Militant”; we’re the Church Mediocre….

My students simply don’t get it. Their hearts have never felt the fundamental religious emotion of awe. Religion to them is simply the attempt to do their duty to God and each other, They do not understand God’s wildness because they do not dare to be wild. They would never design a Gothic cathedral…. They are already in a Brave New World. Camus said that the culture of modern man could be summarized very simply: “They fornicated and read the newspapers.

We are so accustomed to our fanatical anti-fanaticism that it takes an outsider like Alexander Solzhenitsyn to notice it, Look up his 1978 Harvard commencement address, where he shocked his audience by noticing the absence in America of one of the four cardinal virtues, the one that is a necessary ingredient of all the other virtues: courage, the will to sacrifice and suffer pain for a higher good, There is no need for courage, or for heroes, in Brave New World.

Sloth even trumps lust; even our lusts are slothful, not world-shaking and romantic. They are calculated! We no longer have even pagan blood in our veins; we have water,. At room temperature.

— Peter Kreeft, Wisdom of the Heart

In almost his last words from the cross, he said to his favorite disciple(s), “Behold your mother.” Obeying that last command from our Lord before he died is the most powerful thing we can do to conquer lust, first of all in ourselves, and thus, inevitably, in our society. (There simply is no other way to save your society but to begin with yourelf). To combat an abortion-loving society that sacrifices motherhood for physical sex, Mary replies by sacrificing her physical sex to become our spiritual mother, the daughter and handmaid of God the Father, the Mother of God the Son,, and the spouse of God the Spirit. She is powerful., Satan hates and fears her. She is only God’s instrument, the “handmaid of the Lord,” but she is God’s favorite instrument. She does to lust what sunlight does to maggots.

— Peter Kreeft, Wisdom of the Heart

Lust is not twisted because it is passionate or because it is physical or because it is sexual but because it is selfish., Its end is not the good of the beloved but the pleasure of the lover…. Lust is to love what a hitman is to a knight, what a plagiarist is to a poet, what a cannibal is to a chef, what a poacher is to a hunter, and what a Pharisee is to a saint.

— Peter Kreeft, Wisdom of the Heart

The immediate harm done to the human soul by lust, and by the Sexual Revolution’s success at re-labeling this deadly sin as a lively game, is the same as the harm done by pride: it makes you blind…. It lets the sex organs do the brain’s work. It prefers subjective fantasy to objective reality. It says to Truth, and thus to God, “I will not serve. I am in charge here, not You.” It is aform of pride. Lust isn’t the worst thing about lust; pride is. It’s “autonomy”; it’s “me-ism.”

— Peter Kreeft, Wisdom of the Hear

We are engaged in radical self-surgery: a consciencectomy, a ripping up of our moral motherboard. We have become Lewis’s “men without chests:” what is left is only heads and hormones, not hearts; only calculation and cupidity, not conscience.

— Peter Kreeft, Wisdom of the Heart

We are not immoral; we are amoral about sex. Our amoralism in that one area cannot stay confined. It requires, both as its cause and its effect, a general amoralism…. The Sexual Revolution is already the main cause of a general moral relativism, and even though most people are not yet morally relativistic about ecology, nuclear war, smoking, or insider trading, only about sex, this cancer of relativism must inevitably metastasize. It has alreay metastasized to everything sexual: contraception, pornography, fornication, sodomy, surrogate motherhood, plural parenthood, test tube babies, transgenderism….

— Peter Kreeft, Wisdom of the Heart

…the single most obvious and important truth about sex: that its meaning is us — people, persons, new human beings. “The reproductive system” has been reduced to “the recreational system”; new human beings have become “accidents” on this new highway; and the “accidents” are dealt with by “insurance” companies like Planned Parenthood. In just two generations, since the legalization of this highly protected first-degree murder, the worldwide corpses outnumber those of all the wars and genocides in human history put together.

— Peter Kreeft, Wisdom of the Heart

The most immediate and disastrous consequenc of the lust establishment has been our “final solution” to the unwanted baby problem, the holocaust of abortion, the number of whose corpses vastly exceeds that of Hitler’s “final solution to the Jewish problem.” If our ancestors could have been Rip Van Winkled into our present day, they would find it literally unbelievable. One out of very three pregnancies is treated as a disease, and the cure is the cold-blooded, calculated murder of our own innocent unborn sons and daughters.

— Peter Kreeft, Wisdom of the Heart

There are still pockets of believers in the old morality, but they do not design most of the advertisements, the movies, the TV shows, the popular novels, the universities, the newspapers, the social media, or the political platforms.

— Peter Kreeft, Wisdom of the Heart

No other society in history has so massively overturned the universal and perennial moral law about sexual behavior, not just in practice, but in theory, in thought, in understanding. We no longer see sex asx relative to life but life as relative to sex. Only a massive educational strategy could possibly have produced such amazing reversal.

— Peter Kreeft, Wisdom of the Heart

Why do we have less and less time, not more and more time, the more technological time-saving devices we have? (Don’t just let that question fly away; demand an answer!)

— Peter Kreeft, Wisdom of the Heart

Technology gives us more power over nature but less power over ourselves, in gluing us into an ever vaster and stronger spider’s web of dependency. That is why we feel more powerless as individuals than our ancestors did. They would survive a nuclear winter better than we would. Their hands were calloused but their minds were clear and their hearts were soft; our hands are soft but our minds are unclear and our hearts are calloused.

— Peter Kreeft, Wisdom of the Heart

Whether the slaves are made of flesh and blood or of computer chips, the more slaves we have, the more enslaved to them and the less free we become.

— Peter Kreeft, Wisdom of the Heart

And among all our Frankenstein monsters, no technological invention in history has ever been so instantly and totally addictive as the smartphone.

— Peter Kreeft, Wisdom of the Heart

[Even religion today caters to greed: Love they neighbor = give them money and possessions]]

As C.S. Lewis puts it in The Abolition of Man, to all previous cultures, the ultimate meaning of life, the end to which every other good is a means, was the conformity of the human soul to objective reality (which we believed to be more than the material world), and the means was wisdom, virtue, and self-discipline; to our culture, the end is the conformity of objective reality (thought of now in merely material terms) to the wishes of the human soul, and the means is technique, or technology. Greed for power over nature has become our end and our obsession.

— Peter Kreeft, Wisdom of the Heart

Greed (avarice) and gluttony are similar. In both, an empty self seeks to compensate for its inner emptiness by filling itself, either with money and power (greed) or with food and drink (gluttony)….. But gluttony is not radically modern, and neither is greed for money and the power it gives us. What is radically modern is the greed for gadgets, for technology, for the efficiency and control they have been so spectacularly successful in giving us.

— Peter Kreeft, Wisdom of the Heart

Every religion in the world in some way teaches this: that the only fulfillment of the self is not selfishness, that we have to get off the throne, that the only way to really live is to die to yourself. Only a post-religious culture could possibly esteem self-esteem and admire self-admiration; all true religion admires self-forgetfulness.

— Peter Kreeft, Wisdom of the Heart

There is nothing to fear but fear itself, nothing to feel guilty about except feeling guilty.

— Peter Kreeft, Wisdom of the Heart

Self-esteem is the primary value taught by our most popular prophets, the pop psychologists. Its influence is everywhere, even in religion.

— Peter Kreeft, Wisdom of the Heart

The “sexual revolution:” is the source of most of our culture’s proud demand for autonomy (or perhaps it is vice versa) and of our rebellion against the Church, God’s prophet in the world; for only the Church dares to oppose that revolution. She is like an old mother warning her children that the “autonomy” of life in the streets gives us less freedom, not more, than life in the family; that the hookup culture and the drug culture and the consumerist culture is not a recipe for happiness. Our lust is rooted in our pride (as well as vice versa). It is our pride, the deadliest sin, that prevents us from listening to either of God’s two prophets against all the other deadly sins — either the Church without or conscience within. We worship our sex organs because we worship ourselves.

— Peter Kreeft, Wisdom of the Heart

Humility is not an unrealistically low judgment about ourselves; it is simply the honest and realistic admission that we are not autonomous, that we depend on God as our absolute norm, and also on our family and friends and the whole of humanity in many relative ways.

— Peter Kreeft, Wisdom of the Heart

The opposite of pride is humility. Humility is not a low opinion of yourself. It is not any opinion of yourself. It is letting God be the one to have opinions about yourself. Humility means becoming childlike, which Christ starkly said was the only way we could enter the Kingdom of Heaven.

— Peter Kreeft, Wisdom of the Heart

But the worst confusion of all is to confuse our true freedom with a fake freedom — namely, autonomy, freedom from norms, from moral obligations, from conscience, and thus from God. This is not only not true freedom, it is an infallible prescription for the loss of true freedom, another word for which is “damnation”.

— Peter Kreeft, Wisdom of the Heart

Most of our modern novelists have failed miserably to show the individuality, creativity, originality, and interesting nature of goodness. Their villains are more interestng than their heroes. Tolkien is one of the very few exceptions.

— Peter Kreeft, Wisdom of the Heart

Obedience to moral law makes us free and original and creative, while disobedience makes us unfree sinaholics. We can become addicted to many things, but all addicts are similar psychologically…. The more we open our will to God’s plan for the unique character and destiny that the great creative Artist has in mind for us, the more unique and free we become.

— Peter Kreeft, Wisdom of the Heart

Since agape includes the gift of the body, it is even open to martyrdom. Notice the similarity between martyrdom and marriage! Both are total. Obviously, the paradigm of this love is Christ’s gift to us or his very body and blood on the Cross and in the Eucharist. Surprisingly, erotic love, which is the most physical love, can be an ingredient in this most spiritual love. At its best, it can be the most total human love and can most totally unite these two dimensions, the physical and the spiritual. That is why eros is the mystics’ favorite image for agape.

— Peter Kreeft, Wisdom of the Heart

Love is the whole meaning and value and purpose and end and goal of life. It’s love that makes a saint, and that’s why we exist…. Only a person of extraordinary wickedness or one with serious brain damage can possibly lack this knowledge, deep down…. It is the law of our very being, of our essence, not a law imposed upon us by any alien force, human or divine. It is like the law of non-contradiction: it has no alternative…. It can only be suppressed.

— Peter Kreeft, Wisdom of the Heart

Not everyone consciously and deliberately has this hope in love, which is really hope in God anonymously; not everyone believes this love is possible. But everyone wishes it were.

— Peter Kreeft, Wisdom of the Heart

It is much easier for the will to overcome temptations to lust or greed when the emotions have been trained by moderation in the appetites, and when the loves have been trained and freed from addictions.

— Peter Kreeft, Wisdom of the Heart

There are objective truths about matter (the physical highways), and about ethics (the moral highways), and about numbers (the mental highways). There is an objective “real world” as well as a subjective “inner world”, and if the two do not match, we live a lie. And if the lie of the mismatch is big enough, we are insane. The fundamental measure of sanity or insanity is that match or mismatch. If I believe I am the greatest philosopher in the world, I am an arrogant idiot. If I believe I am the archangel Gabriel in disguise, I am probably literally insane. If I believe I am God, I am maximally insane.

— Peter Kreeft, Wisdom of the Heart

If you accomplish something good with hard work, the labor passes quickly, but the good endures; if you do something shameful in pursuit of pleasure, the pleasure passes quickly, but the shame endures.

— Gaius Musonius Rufus, Fragment

The more you love God, or Satan, or justice, or cruelty, or steak, or ice cream, the more you become like God, or Satan, or justice, or cruelty, or steak, or ice cream.

— Peter Kreeft, Wisdom of the Heart

If you are prone to unhappiness when poor, you are very likely to be prone to unhappiness when rich.

— Derren Brown, Happy