Bernard Lonergan Quotes

• Total surrender to the demands of the human spirit: be attentive, be intelligent, be reasonable, be responsible, be in love.

  Bernard Lonergan

  Intelligent, Demand, Spirit

  Bernard J. F. Lonergan (1990). “Method in Theology”, p.268, University of Toronto Press

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• The fulfilment that is being in love with God is not the product of our knowledge and choice. It is God's gift. Like all being in love, as distinct from particular acts of loving, it is a first principle. So far from resulting from our knowledge and choice, it dismantles and abolishes the horizon within which our knowing and choosing went on, and it sets up a new horizon within which the love of God transvalues our values and the eyes of that love transform our knowing.

  Bernard Lonergan

  Eye, Being In Love, Knowing

  Bernard Lonergan (2016). “A Second Collection”, p.131, University of Toronto Press

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• Discovery is new beginning. It is the origin of new rules that supplement, or even supplant, the old. Genius is creative. It is genius precisely because it disregards established routines, because it originates the novelties that will be the routines of the future. Were there rules for discovery, then discoveries would be mere conclusions.

  Bernard Lonergan

  New Beginnings, Discovery, Creative

  Bernard Lonergan (1992). “Insight: A Study of Human Understanding”, p.77, University of Toronto Press

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• The church always arrives on the scene a little breathless and a little late.

  Bernard Lonergan

  Church, Littles, Scene

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• Thoroughly understand what it is to understand, and not only will you understand the broad lines of all there is to be understood but also you will possess a fixed base, an invariant pattern, opening upon all further developments of understanding.

  Bernard Lonergan

  Understanding, Patterns, Development

  Bernard Lonergan (1992). “Insight: A Study of Human Understanding”, p.70, University of Toronto Press

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• Choice is a determinant in personal development ... by my free acts I am making myself.

  Bernard Lonergan

  Choices, Development, Personal Development

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• Freely the subject makes himself what he is, never in this life is the making finished, always it is in process, always it is a precarious achievement that can slip and fall and shatter.

  Bernard Lonergan

  Fall, Achievement, Life Is

  Bernard J. F. Lonergan, Frederick E. Crowe, Robert M. Doran, Lonergan Research Institute (1993). “Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan: Collection”, p.220, University of Toronto Press

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• In philosophy an individual is becoming himself.

  Bernard Lonergan

  Philosophy, Becoming, Individual

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• For it is in the field where meaning is constitutive that man's freedom reaches its highest point. There too his responsibility is greatest. There there occurs the emergence of his existential subject, finding out for himself that he has to decide for himself what he is to make of himself.

  Bernard Lonergan

  Responsibility, Men, Fields

  Bernard J. F. Lonergan, Mark D. Morelli, Elizabeth A. Morelli (1997). “The Lonergan Reader”, p.390, University of Toronto Press

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• No matter what your logic is, if it is coherent, you can develop a technique to express it.

  Bernard Lonergan

  Technique, Matter, Logic

  Bernard J. F. Lonergan, Frederick E. Crowe, Philip J. McShane, Robert M. Doran, Lonergan Research Institute (2001). “Phenomenology and Logic: The Boston College Lectures on Mathematical Logic and Existentialism”, p.90, University of Toronto Press

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• Faith ... is a conscious apprehension of something inevident, something which unlike this desk and this chair is not seen to be there, even if it enters into the fabric of our personal relations to reality with at least as much force, relevance, and moment as things which are seen to be there.

  Bernard Lonergan

  Reality, Fabric, Moments

  Bernard Lonergan (2016). “A Second Collection”, p.17, University of Toronto Press

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• God is utterly simple; for every composite being necessarily has a cause of its own composition, and so, since God is the first principle of all things, there can be no real composition whatever in God. Now, in an utterly simple being there can be nothing that is not that simple being itself. In God, therefore, whatever really is, is the same as God, is the same as that which is, is the same as that which subsists, and hence necessarily subsists.

  Bernard Lonergan

  Real, Simple, Firsts

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• If one denies that, when the meaning is true, then the meant is what is so, one rejects propositional truth. If the rejection is universal, then it is the self-destructive proposition that there are no true propositions. If the rejection is limited to the dogmas, then it is just a roundabout way of saying that all the dogmas are false.

  Bernard Lonergan

  Self, Rejection, Way

  Bernard Lonergan (2016). “A Second Collection”, p.16, University of Toronto Press

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• It is in the measure that special methods acknowledge their common core in transcendental method, that norms common to all the sciences will be acknowledged, that a secure basis will be attained for tackling interdisciplinary problems, and that the sciences will be mobilized within a higher unity of vocabulary, thought and orientation, in which they will be able to make their quite significant contribution to the solution of fundamental problems.

  Bernard Lonergan

  Vocabulary, Unity, Special

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