A Quote by Peter Kreeft

But how can we love someone if we don't like him? Easy-we do it to ourselves all the time. We don't always have tender, comfortable feelings about ourselves; sometimes we feel foolish, stupid, asinine, or wicked. But we always love ourselves: we always seek our own good. Indeed, we feel dislike toward ourselves, we berate ourselves, precisely because we love ourselves; because we care about our good, we are impatient with our bad.
we unwittingly project onto God our own attitudes and feelings toward ourselves... But we cannot assume that He feels about us the way we feel about ourselves -- unless we love ourselves compassionately, intensely, and freely.
Many of our feelings of satisfaction or dissatisfaction have their roots in how we compare ourselves to others. When we compare ourselves to those who have more, we feel bad. When we compare ourselves to those who have less, we feel grateful. Even though the truth is we have exactly the same life either way, our feelings about our life can vary tremendously based on who we compare ourselves with. Compare yourself with those examples that are meaningful but that make you feel comfortable with who you are and what you have.
There is a quality of murky grandeur we give ourselves in having our own feelings, recoiling, separate from other things... To feel that we can care for ourselves without seeing our feelings as objects, and liking them as objects, is to be wrong about our care for ourselves.
The basis of all love is self-love and we certainly suffer a lot in our society from lack of self-love. When we don't take care of ourselves, it's really just a symptom of not loving ourselves. So the worst thing that we can do is to beat ourselves up for how we've already treated ourselves.
It is difficult to see ourselves as we are. Sometimes we are fortunate enough to have good friends, lovers or others who will do us the good service of telling us the truth about ourselves. When we don't, we can so easily delude ourselves, lose a sense of truth about ourselves, and our conscience loses power and purpose. Mostly, we tell ourselves what we would like to hear. We lose our way.
Loving ourselves is about acceptance, not always liking and feeling comfortable. In the same way I love my fiancé, I love him but don't always like his behavior. I don't always like what he says. But I accept him. I accept him because of these things. It doesn't mean I don't want our relationship to grow or progress. But I don't feel the need to change him. When I accept him for him, we grow naturally, and the same for our own self-love.
We read because they teach us about people, we can see ourselves in them,in their problems.And by seeing ourselves in them, we clarify ourselves, we explain ourselves to ourselves, so we can live with ourselves.
The second commandment that Jesus referred to was not to love others instead of ourselves, but to love them as ourselves. Before we can love and serve others, we must love ourselves, even in our imperfection. If we don't embrace our own defects, we can't love others with their shortcomings.
If we don't love ourselves, we would not love others. When someone tell you to love others first, and to love others more than ourselves; it is impossible. If you can't love yourselves, you can't love anybody else. Therefore we must gather up our great power so that we know in what ways we are good, what special abilities we have, what wisdom, what kind of talent we have, and how big our love is. When we can recognize our virtues, we can learn how to love others.
People mistake self-love for thinking they must always like what they see in the mirror - and yes, of course, that is the goal; that all depends on perspective - but my argument is that you can still have self-love while wanting to make progress or improve things. The main issue is that we attach too much to an idea of what our perfect body may be or what self-love should be. But that's the issue. There is no right or wrong. We can love ourselves and feel bloated. We can love ourselves but feel uncomfortable in our skin. We are a work in progress and human and won't always feel amazing.
You just have to work, we all have to work really hard to take care of ourselves and feed ourselves good information, just like we feed ourselves good food. Feed ourselves good books and good messaging and the things that make us feel like we can be connected with ourselves and others in a deeper way.
When [our secrets] are sad and hurtful secrets, like my father's death, we can in a way honor the hurt by letting ourselves feel it as we never let ourselves feel it before, and then, having felt it, by laying it aside; we can start to take care of ourselves the way we take care of people we love.
Self-love makes us deceive ourselves in almost all matters, to censure others, and to blame them for the same faults that we do not correct in ourselves; we do this either because we are unaware of the evil that exists within us, or because we always see our own evil disguised as a good.
To love ourselves is to act respectfully toward ourselves, to enjoy our own company when in solitude, to honor our limits and speak our truths.
How do we define, how do we describe, how do we explain and/or understand ourselves? What sort of creatures do we take ourselves to be? What are we? Who are we? Why are we? How do we come to be what or who we are or take ourselves to be? How do we give an account of ourselves? How do we account for ourselves, our actions, interactions, transactions (praxis), our biologic processes? Our specific human existence?
The larger loneliness of our lives evolves from our unwillingness to spend ourselves, stir ourselves. We are always damping down our inner weather, permitting ourselves the comforts of postponement, of rehearsals
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