Peter Kreeft Quotes

Only God may be adored, because only God is unlimited goodness, truth, and beauty, and thus only God deserves unlimited love.

Everything smaller than Heaven bores us because only Heaven is bigger than our hearts.

A saint is Christ's bride, totally attached, faithful, dependent. A saint is also totally independent, detached from idols and from other husbands... A saint is higher than anyone else in the world. A saint is the real mountain climber. A saint is also lower than anyone else in the world. As with water, he flows to the lowest places - like Calcutta.

Most people believe you have to have some moral absolutes if you want to hold back chaos.

Don't be more serious than God. God invented dog farts. God designed your body's plumbing system. God designed an ostrich. If He didn't do it, He permitted a drunken angel to do it. Empirical facts can add significantly to the meaning of "being godlike".

God is love. Wraith is how His love appears to us when we sin or rebel or run away from Him. The very light that is meant to help us appears to us as our enemy when we seek the darkness.

Atheism is cheap on people, because it snobbishly says nine out of ten people through history have been wrong about God and have had a lie at the core of their hearts.

The field of earth and of our human nature is now no longer barren but full of the seed of divine life. But it takes time for the seed to grow, for the Kingdom to come, and we are commanded to pray and work for that coming, that growth, even if we do not yet see the fruits, or even the blossoms, or even the leaves...

It is said that there are three sources of evil, "the world, the flesh, and the Devil"; but the world and the flesh would be innocent were it not for the Devil.

Trusting God's grace means trusting God's love for us rather than our love for God. [...] Therefore our prayers should consist mainly of rousing our awareness of God's love for us rather than trying to rouse God's awareness of our love for him, like the priests of Baal on Mount Carmel (1 Kings 18:26-29).

The first rule for prayer, the most important first step, is not about how to do it, but to just do it; not to perfect and complete it but to begin it. Once the car is moving, it's easy to steer it in the right direction, but it's much harder to start it up when it's stalled. And prayer is stalled in our world.

When I say "The good man gave his good dog a good meal," I use "good" analogically, for there is at the same time a similarity and a difference between a good man, a good dog, and a good meal. All three are desirable, but a good man is wise and moral, a good dog is tame and affectionate, and a good meal is tasty and nourishing. But a good man is not tasty and nourishing, except to a cannibal; a good dog is not wise and moral, except in cartoons, and a good meal is not tame and affectionate, unless it's alive as you eat it.

There is one and only one possible road to joy: selfless love.

Peace is a mark of the Holy Spirit.

Cats don't need to be possessed; they're evil on their own.

Like apes, we breed, sleep, and die. Yet like God we say, "I am." We are ontological oxymorons.

The self is like a baseball. Throw it back to the divine pitcher who pitched it to you in the first place, and the game of love goes on. Hold it, and the game is over. That is the difference between Heaven and Hell.

To worship a crocodile is better to worship yourself.

Like white light refracted through a prism and split into many colors, God's eternal love-nature, expressed through the prism of time, becomes God's multicolored love story. History is His story.

Humility, humility, humility, and humility.

Not all Tolkien haters are Orcs, but all Orcs are Tolkien haters.

God is not pre or post anything. He is present to everything. ... There is not predestination but destination, not predestiny but destiny. This follows from divine omniscience and eternity.

The Church is God's Bride. All the saints and mystics say the ultimate purpose of human life, the highest end for which we were made, is the Spiritual Marriage. This is not socially relative; it is eternal. And in it, the soul is spiritually impregnated by God, not vice versa. That is the ultimate reason why God must always be he to us, never she. Religion is essentially heterosexual and therefore fruitful.

Without that freedom to sin there is also no freedom to love.

Socrates: So even our walks are dangerous here. But you seem to have avoided the most dangerous thing of all. Bertha: What's that? Socrates: Philosophy. Bertha: Oh, we have philosophers here. Socrates: Where are they? Bertha: In the philosophy department. Socrates: Philosophy is not department. Bertha: Well, we have philosophers. Socrates: Are they dangerous? Bertha: Of course not. Socrates: Then they are not true philosophers.

Of course the more you love the sinner the more you hate and make war on the sin, just as the more you love the person, the more you hate and kill the cancer cells that are killing the person. Compassion for cancer cells does not come from compassion for persons; it comes precisely from lack of compassion for persons.

Only God is to be loved for His own sake. Everything else is to be loved for God's sake.

I think nobody alive today is a more powerful agent of conversion than someone like Mother Teresa. You can refute arguments but not her life. When she came to the National Prayer Breakfast and lectured President Clinton about abortion, he had nothing to say to her. He can't argue with a saint. It's too bad there isn't an easier way, because becoming a saint is not the easiest thing in the world. It's much easier to become an apologist or a philosopher or a theologian.

Mary's light is like that of the moon, totally reflected from the sun, the Son of God.

When you give yourself away you find that a new and more real self has somehow been given to you.

We sin because we see sin as a bargain. We unconsciously calculate that it’s worth it, that it pays.

Joy is not a feeling in us. Joy does not enter into us. We enter into joy: "Enter into the joy of your Lord" (Mt 25:21).

You cannot be in love with love.

It is closer to the truth to say that God is crazy than that God is reasonable. I suspect God merely smiles when someone calls him crazy, but shakes His head and frowns when someone calls Him reasonable.

Bad times make good people, as mountainous pressures make diamonds or as fire tempers steel.

The most striking feature if this map is the stark fat of the Two Roads. There is the road that leads to Life, and there is the road that leads to Death. There is Good, and there is Evil. There is Right and there is Wrong.

Thus moral theology leads us four steps deeper than law. To fulfill the moral law, we need love. To get love, we need union with God. To get union with God, we need the new birth. And to get the new birth, we need faith.

It is mercy, not justice or courage or even heroism, that alone can defeat evil.

If your life is Christ, then your death will be only more of Christ, forever. If your life is only Christlessness, then your death will be only more Christlessness, forever. That's not fundamentalism, that's the law of non-contradiction.

There are also two Christianities in the world today. There is (1) the Christianity of the New Testament, and there is (2) the Christianity of accommodation to modernism, egalitarianism, niceness, naturalism, pop psychology, secular humanism, relativism, subjectivism, individualism, "Enlightenment" rationalism or postmodern irrationalism. New converts to the first Christianity are constantly amazed and scandalized by finding many of their clergy to be in love with the second and in fear of the first.

No emotion, merely as an emotion, is a sin, because we cannot directly control the arising of an emotion in our soul.

Anyone, without exception, can know God if they really want to simply by praying, by honestly telling Him that they want to know Him. He always responds to honest seekers. Jesus promised, 'All who seek, find.

We sinned for no reason but an incomprehensible lack of love, and He saved us for no reason but an incomprehensible excess of love.

The world was won for Christ not by arguments but by sanctity: "What you are speaks so loud, I can hardly hear what you say."

If you truly love God and His will, then doing what you will, will, in fact, be doing what God wills.

It is the modern feminists who are the real male chauvinists, lusting for reproductive freedom (sexual irresponsibility) like playboys and demanding empowerment, that is, envying and imitating not only males, but male fools, judging inner worth by outer performance, sacrificing being for doing, finding their identity in their worldly careers, not in their inner essence, in their physical and spiritual wombs and motherhoods. This is what Karl Stern called "the flight from woman."

Atheists in C.S. Lewis' day were as snobbish and arrogant as they are now, but better educated and more capable of debate.

Agape's object is always the concrete individual, not some abstraction called humanity. Love of humanity is easy because humanity does not surprise you with inconvenient demands. You never find humanity on your doorstep, stinking and begging.