Goodness, Truth and Beauty
- “Do all the good you can. By all the means you can. In all the ways you can. In all the places you can. At all the times you can. To all the people you can. As long as ever you can.”
by John Wesley - “God has been very good to me, for I never dwell upon anything wrong which a person has done, so as to remember it afterwards. If I do remember it, I always see some other virtue in that person.”
by Saint Teresa of Avila - “I have found the paradox that if I love until it hurts, then there is no hurt, but only more love.”
by Mother Teresa The Simple Path - ““Creator”–why did God create? He needed nothing, being perfect and eternal. There is only one possible motive: altruistic love, sheer generosity, the desire to share His goodness and glory with others.”
by Peter Kreeft - “We are looking for our own virtue, our own piety, our own goodness, and so live on and in our own poverty and weakness -today pleased and comforted with the seeming firmness and strength of our own pious tempers and fancying ourselves to be somewhat. Tomorrow, fallen into our own mire, we are dejected, but not humbled; we grieve,
but it is only the grief of pride at the seeing our perfection not to be such as we had vainly imagined. And thus it will be, till the whole turn of our minds be so changed that we as fully see and know our inability to have any goodness of our own as to have a life of our own.”
by William Law - “The first question which the priest and the Levite asked was: “If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?” But… the good Samaritan reversed the question: “If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?””
by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. - “What doth it profit thee to enter into deep discussions concerning the Holy Trinity, if thou lack humility, and be thus displeasing to the Trinity? For verily it is not deep words that make a man holy and upright; it is a good life which maketh a man dear to God. I had rather feel contrition than be skillful in the definition thereof. If thou knewest the whole Bible, and the sayings of all the philosophers, what should this profit thee without the love and grace of God?”
by Thomas à Kempis - “God is all that is good, as I see it—and the goodness that all things have, it is He.”
by Julian Of Norwich - “No man or woman of the humblest sort can really be strong, gentle, pure and good without the world being better for it, without somebody being helped and comforted by the very existence of that goodness.”
by Phillips Brooks - “There is nothing I am less good at than love. I am far better in competition than in love. I am far better at responding to my instincts and ambitions to get ahead and make my mark than I am at figuring out how to love another. I am schooled and trained in acquisitive skills, in getting my own way. And yet I decide, every day, to set aside what I can do best and attempt what I do very clumsily—open myself to the frustrations and failures of loving, daring to believe that failing in love is better than succeeding in pride.”
by Eugene Peterson - “Bad cannot succeed even in being bad as truly as good is good. If all Hell’s miseries together entered the consciousness of yon wee yellow bird on the bough there, they would be swallowed up without trace, as if one drop of ink had been dropped into that Great Ocean to which your terrestrial Pacific itself is only a molecule.”
by C. S. Lewis The Great Divorce - “Badness is only spoiled goodness.”
by C. S. Lewis The Case for Christianity - “No man knows how bad he is till he has tried very hard to be good.”
by C. S. Lewis - “The closer we are to God, to divine attributes-such as absolute truth, goodness, and beauty-the more we wonder. When we separate ourselves from truth, goodness, and beauty, we lose wonder and become cynical. The Enlightenment was basically the narrowing of our vision to a purely scientific, empirical, rationalistic worldview, screwing down the manhole covers on us so we became squinting underground creatures.”
by Peter Kreeft - “We are not taught much today that honestly means to seek truth in an absolute, fanatical way. Truth is no longer absolute, but is soft, squishy, and negotiable. Most Christians still do believe in an objective truth but don’t see it as something to which we must be conformed. Truth has become merely one of the ingredients in their experience, one of the things they can use to obtain happiness.”
by Peter Kreeft - “Was not Jesus an extremist for love-Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, pray for them that despitefully use you. Was not Amos an extremist for justice-Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream. Was not Paul an extremist for the gospel of Jesus Christ-I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus…So the question is not whether we will be extremist but what kind of extremist will we be…In that dramatic scene on Calvary’s hill, three men were crucified. We must not forget that all three were crucified for the same crime-the crime of extremism. Two were extremists for immorality, and thusly fell below their environment. The other, Jesus Christ, was an extremist for love, truth and goodness, and thereby rose above his environment.”
by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Letter from Birmingham Jail - “It becomes Christians to pray for peace and quiet, but not to abandon steadfast faith and truth, even at the peril of death.”
by Ambrose of Milan - “The individual needs the return to spiritual values, for he can survive in the present human situation only by reaffirming that man is not just a biological and psychological being but also a spiritual being, that is creature, and existing for the purposes of his Creator and subject to Him.”
by Peter Drucker Landmarks of Tomorrow: A Report on the New ‘Post-Modern’ World (1959) - “The simple step of a courageous individual is not to take part in the lie. One word of truth outweighs the world.”
by Alexander Solzhenitsyn - “I aim tonight only at reversing the popular belief that reality is totally alien to our minds. My answer to that view consists simply restating it in the form: ‘Our minds are totally alien to reality.’ Put that way, it reveals itself as a self-contradiction. For if our minds are totally alien to reality than all our thoughts, including this thought, are worthless. We must, then, grant logic to the reality; we must, if we are to have any moral standards, grant it moral standards too. And there is really no reason why we should not do the same about standards of beauty. There is no reason why our reaction to a beautiful landscape should not be the response, however humanly blurred and partial, to a something that is really there. The idea of a wholly mindless and valueless universe has to be abandoned at one point-i.e. as regards logic: after that, there is no telling at how many other points it will be defeated nor how great the reversal of our nineteenth century philosophy must finally be.”
by C. S. Lewis De Futilitate; in Christian Reflections - “The emotional quality of what we moderns call our thought produces an extreme violence of conviction combined with extreme incoherence in our arguments.”
by Jacques Ellul - “A thing is not necessarily true because badly uttered, nor false because spoken magnificently.”
by Saint Augustine - “Understanding is the reward of faith. Therefore seek not to understand that thou mayest believe, but believe that thou mayest understand.”
by Augustine On the Gospel of St. John - “The proper question to be asked about any creed is not ‘Is it pleasant?’ but ‘Is it true?’”
by Dorothy Sayers - ““Truth, even crucified and buried, still has a way of rising faith out of the grave, reasserting itself and challenging people to repentance and change.””
by Naim Stifan Ateek, Palestinian canon of St. George’s Cathedral, Jerusalem
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