Bernard Lonergan Quotes

#1. 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

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

Bernard Lonergan

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

Bernard Lonergan

#4. 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

#5. 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

#6. 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

#7. Be attentive, be intelligent, be responsible, be loving, and if necessary, change.

Bernard Lonergan

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

Bernard Lonergan

#9. In philosophy an individual is becoming himself.

Bernard Lonergan

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

Bernard Lonergan