Peter Kreeft Quotes

Our judgements of good and evil ... presuppose God as the standard. If there's no God, there's neither good nor evil. There's just nature doing what it does

When we believe that God is something other than a lover, it is inevitable that we will sin.

Objective truth itself is sometimes often seen as a right wing Republican-Christian plot to take over the government (though the rhetoric is cleverer than that, that's the bottom line).

Even David Hume, one of history most famous skeptics, said it's just barely possible that God exists.

Agape is the catalyst that makes value appear in anything.

When I think how much my Protestant brothers and sisters are missing in not having Christ's Real Presence in the Eucharist; when I kneel before the Eucharist and realize I am as truly in Christ's presence as the apostles were but that my Protestant brothers and sisters don't know that, don't believe that - I at first feel a terrible gap between myself and them. What a tremendous thing they are missing!

There are relatively few atheists among neurologists and brain surgeons and astrophysicists, but many among psychologists, sociologists, and historians. The reason seems obvious: the first study divine design, the second study human undesign.

Scripture starts with the particular and then universalizes it. You are called to love your concrete individual neighbor and then to realize that every individual is your neighbor. The point is not to destroy concrete neighborhood in a fit of universalism but to expand the local neighborhood and embrace the universal neighborhood.

Control language and you control thought; control thought and you control action; control action and you control the world.

The most total opposite of pleasure is not pain but boredom, for we are willing to risk pain to make a boring life interesting.

God's interventions are miracles: events that cannot happen by merely natural agents but only by a supernatural agent. They no more interfere with our free will than natural events like earthquakes. We choose how to respond to them.

If you love, you will suffer. The only way to protect yourself against suffering is to protect yourself against love - and that is the greatest suffering of all, loneliness.

True love, unlike popular sentimental substitutes, is willing to suffer. Love is not "luv." Love is the cross. Our problem at first, the sheer problem of suffering, was a cross without Christ. We must never fall into the opposite and equal trap of a Christ without a cross.

The closer we are to God, to divine attributes - such as absolute truth, goodness, and beauty - the more we wonder. When we separate ourselves from truth, goodness, and beauty, we lose wonder and become cynical. The Enlightenment was basically the narrowing of our vision to a purely scientific, empirical, rationalistic worldview, screwing down the manhole covers on us so we became squinting underground creatures.

Original sin is the proclivity to say "my will be done" instead of "thy will be done."

If you want to get wet, go out to where it is raining; If you want to be a saint, find one and hang out with him.

God gives us not only the truth but also the ability to believe it; not only the new thing to see but also the new eye to see it with.

God is a person [in Christ]. A person can be known only by personal understanding, not impersonal understanding. Personal understanding takes place through love, caring, willingness, intimacy, and relationship.

Be egalitarian regarding persons. Be elitist regarding ideas.

Every gift requires two freedoms: the giver's and the receiver's.

Faith and hope bring us through time but leave us at the doorstep of eternity. Only love goes with us inside.

In an age of relativism, orthodoxy is the only possible rebellion left

The womb is like an altar, it's the place where God continually comes into the world and does what only God can do...create.

Most theists are deists most of the time, in practice if not in theory. They practice the absence of God instead of the presence of God.

The greatest Christians in history seem to say that their sufferings ended up bringing them the closest to God - so this is the best thing that could happen, not the worst.

Moral stupidity comes in two different forms: relativism and legalism. Relativism sees no principles, only people; legalism sees no people, only principles.

Our soul, like Mary's body, is to receive God Himself if only we, like her, believe, consent and receive; if only we speak her truly magic word fiat, "let it be." It is the creative word, the word God used to create the universe.

The scripture notion of truth is not an abstract, static, and timeless formula, but is something that comes true in time as the fulfillment of a divine promise. Truth happens in history.

The heart is like a woman, and the head is like a man, and although man is the head of woman, woman is the heart of man, and she turns man's head because she turns his heart.

The deepest healing is the healing of the deepest wound. The deepest wound is the frustration of the deepest need. The deepest need is the need for meaning, purpose, and hope.

Prayer is essentially the practice of the presence of God, and that is the road to Heaven. There is no alternative. God is the only game in town. All other roads are dead ends. Since we must give our all to the one true God, we must not give any part to idols, to the many false gods that now bite away at our lives.

We can and should investigate and learn from the wisdom in other religions.

There is no effective rational answer to the challenge: "But give me a reason why I should love someone who does not deserve it." Love is the highest thing. There can be no higher reason to justify it.

The more we realize we are loved, the more ashamed we are not to love back. The more we sin as a violation of love, not just of law, the more powerful a motive we will have to overcome it. For sin is attractive to us (otherwise we would never be attracted to it) and can be cast out only by something more attractive.

No one justifies lying, cheating, betraying, promise breaking, devastating and harming strangers. But we expect and we tolerate doing this to the one person in the world we promised most seriously to be faithful to forever: we justify divorce.

God continuously comes into the world in two places - at the altar and in the womb.

Our culture has filled our heads but emptied our hearts, stuffed our wallets but starved our wonder. It has fed our thirst for facts but not for meaning or mystery. It produces "nice" people, not heroes.

Faith is the root, the necessary beginning. Hope is the stem, the energy that makes the plant grow. Love is the fruit, the flower, the visible product, the bottom line. The plant of our new life in Christ is one; the life of God comes into us by faith, through us by hope, and out of us by the works of love.

Great saints have often been made out of great sinners, but not one was ever made out of a wimp.

Few Christians go into media or the arts today, or see it as a primary mission field or battlefield. But it is.

Why pray if we cannot change God? ...is that why we pray? To change omniscient Love? Isn't it rather to learn what it is and to fulfill it? Not to change it by our acts, but to change our acts by it.

In an age of hope men looked up at the night sky and saw “the heavens." In an age of hopelessness they call it simply “space.

How you approach the problem of suffering depends on how you approach life itself. There are only two ways. Either meaning is surrounded by matter, or matter is surrounded by meaning.

I find my data first in myself, not first in the poets. For if I did not find it in myself, I would not be able to find it in the poets.

Subtract miracles from Islam, Buddhism, Confucianism, or Toaism, and you have essentially the same religion left. Subtract miracles from Christianity, and you have nothing but the cliches and platitudes most American Christians get weekly (and weakly) from their pulpits.

Intellectuals resist faith longer because they can: where ordinary people are helpless before the light, intellectuals are clever enough to spin webs of darkness around their minds and hide in them. That's why only Ph.D.s believe any of the 100 most absurd ideas in the world such as Absolute Relativism, or the Objective Truth of Subjectivism, of the Meaningfulness of Meaninglessness and the Meaninglessness of Meaning, which is the best definition of Deconstructionism I know.

Philosophy has degenerated into ideology.

Whoever marries the spirit of the times must soon become a widower.