J. Budziszewski Quotes

Even the suicide desires his own good: he wrongly imagines that he would be better off dead. The moral problem is not that we love ourselves but that we love ourselves the wrong way.

It is hard enough to face the moral law even with the revelation that the divine justice and divine mercy are conjoined. It offends our pride to be forgiven, terrifies it to surrender control.

Christian faith undercuts the urge to fix everything on our own, through conviction of the final helplessness of man and confidence in the providence of God--through certainty that only God can set everything to rights, and faith that in the end, He will. Man can only ameliorate, not cure.

Of course there is such a thing as too much doubt, for we ought to accept what is true. But there is also such a thing as proper doubt, for we ought not accept what is false. The possibility of doubt is inherent in the longing to understand, and nothing less than complete and perfect knowledge can satisfy the mind. We do not possess such knowledge here on earth; it is reserved for the beatific vision. Until then, doubt will be with us. This is...why it is so unreasonable to trust only what cannot be doubted, as Descartes proposed, because everything can be doubted. We should believe, not what we cannot doubt, but what we have the best reasons to believe.