quotes by Peggy Noonan

"Cynicism is not realistic and tough. It's unrealistic and kind of cowardly because it means you don't have to try. ---in Good Housekeeping"
— Peggy Noonan

""As we have become more open minded (tolerant) in society we have become more closed hearted." "
— Peggy Noonan

"Cynicism is not realistic and tough. It's unrealistic and kind of cowardly because it means you don't have to try"
— Peggy Noonan

"I always got the feeling with John Paul that if he could have narrowed down the people he met and blessed those he loved the most, they would not be cardinals, princes, or congressman, but nuns from obscure convents and Down syndrome children, especially the latter. Because they have suffered, and because in some serious and amazing way the love of God seems more immediately available to them. Everyone else gets themselves tied up in ambition and ideas and bustle, all the great distractions, but the modest and unwell are so often unusually open to this message: God loves us, his love is all around us, he made us to love him and be happy"
— Peggy Noonan

"I now know that God has a plan for each of us. The thing is to find out what it is.” How? Through prayer, through keeping your mind open, and trough the circumstances of daily life and the people you meet."
— Peggy Noonan

"I find this to be true of my spiritual life, and maybe it applies to yours as well: I think about things more than I do them; I ponder what seems their goodness more than I perform them. As if my thought alone were enough. But a thought alone isn’t quite enough; it’s an impulse and not a commitment, a passing thing that doesn’t take root unless you plant it and make it grow. "
— Peggy Noonan

"What I got was not so much gifts and whishes come trues but a feeling of peace. I got peace itself, actually. And when you have peace, you can be strong; and when you are strong, you can get through what you have to get through, and not with exhaustion and frown marks and slumped shoulders but with relative happiness, and humor, and sometimes even gaiety. "
— Peggy Noonan

"Novak was saying that the pope’s message was in part: You are not nothing; you are a great deal. God made you in his image, and he calls you to be like him. And so you must walk forward in to the world each day with confidence and humility. This reminded me of what a woman in Bible study said once. “Walk with pride, for you are the daughter of a king."
— Peggy Noonan

"You shouldn’t hold on to things, to neuroses. People-artists-think they have to hold on to their neuroses, their pains, or they won’t be a good actor anymore or a good artist. That’s the Liar. The Liar tells you that. You hold on to them, you’ll just wind up a lonely person. People become lonely with them, and the fame has moved on to someone else. You have to heal, you have to maintain relationships... That’s why we say the Our Father: ‘Deliver us from evil'"
— Peggy Noonan

"The Pope replied, “of what should we not be afraid? We should not fear the truth about ourselves.” He spoke of how Saint Peter himself, the rock on which Christ had built his church, had told Christ to leave him, “for I am a sinful man.” Peter was a sinful man. We all are, including popes. We are imperfect and “our hearts are anxious.” But we cannot and should not let the fact of our unworthiness and flaws and failures build that wall with a kind of inverted pride that says, Oh, I’m so unworthy, and I’d know how unworthy I am better than you would."
— Peggy Noonan

"My generation, faced as it grew with a choice between religious belief and existential despair, chose marijuana. Now we are in our Cabernet stage"
— Peggy Noonan

""Boundaries aren't all bad. That's why there are walls around mental institutions.""
— Peggy Noonan (Patriotic Grace: What It Is and Why We Need It Now)

"Boundaries aren't all bad. That's why there are walls around mental institutions."
— Peggy Noonan (Patriotic Grace: What It Is and Why We Need It Now)

"We must try again to be alive to what the people of our country really long for in our national life: forgiveness and grace, maturity and wisdom.

...Our political leaders will know our priorities only if we tell them, again and again, and if those priorities begin to show up in the polls."
— Peggy Noonan (Patriotic Grace: What It Is and Why We Need It Now)

"I should say here, because some in Washington like to dream up ways to control the Internet, that we don't need to 'control' free speech, we need to control ourselves."
— Peggy Noonan (Patriotic Grace: What It Is and Why We Need It Now)

"What we need most right now, at this moment, is a kind of patriotic grace - a grace that takes the long view, apprehends the moment we're in, comes up with ways of dealing with it, and eschews the politically cheap and manipulative. That admits affection and respect. That encourages them. That acknowledges that the small things that divide us are not worthy of the moment; that agrees that the things that can be done to ease the stresses we feel as a nation should be encouraged, while those that encourage our cohesion as a nation should be supported."
— Peggy Noonan (Patriotic Grace: What It Is and Why We Need It Now)

"He [Pope Benedict XVI] spoke of the distilled message of John Paul's reign: "Be not afraid""
— Peggy Noonan