Peter Kreeft
Why is it that nothing can make us as sorrowful as love? It is the same reason that nothing can make us as joyful as love. In love we become the other, we slough off our skin like a snake. Underneath that hard, protective coat of otherness and ego, there is new flesh, incomparably more sensitive than the outer skin. The heart is like a newborn baby. It is our spiritual erogenous zone, capable of exquisite joys and exquisite sufferings by its extreme sensitivity. We appropriately cover and protect these privy parts of the soul, just as we do to the corresponding parts of the body. But when we love, we expose them, to pleasures or pains beyond imagining.
Peter Kreeft
We are just or unjust to ourselves before we are just or unjust to others. Justice is rightness, righteousness. Justice is beauty of soul, soul-art, soul-music.
Peter Kreeft
Plato gives us virtue's grammar; Jesus gives us virtue's poetry.
Peter Kreeft
Socialists miss not only the greatness of the individual but also the greatness of society, for a natural and happy association of free and generous individuals is more of a society than a mass of organized, bureaucratic, and socialized charities.
By overemphasizing society and underemphasizing individuals, socialism does injustice not only to individuals but also to society.
Peter Kreeft
But why have we reduced all the virtues to being kind? Because we have reduced all the goods to one, the one that kindness ministers to: pleasure, comfort, contentment. We have reduced ourselves to pleasure-seeking animals.
Peter Kreeft
I do not think we are necessarily more wicked than our ancestors, overall. True, we are less courageous, less honest with ourselves, less self-disciplined and obviously less chaste than they were. But they were more cruel, intolerant, snobbish, and inhumane than we are.
Peter Kreeft
How are we weak? Not technologically, of course. We are like King Midas, swollen with new powers and riches, although at a price: everything we touch has gone dead and cold.
