Top 100 Peter Kreeft Quotes
#1. You see, God just will not let us flunk out of His school of love. He insists on remedial lessons until we get it right. For this whole world is a school set up by Love Himself to teach us to love.
Peter Kreeft
#2. Suffering together builds togetherness, and if togetherness is more important for us and for our joy than freedom from suffering is, then God is good to allow this suffering.
Peter Kreeft
#3. 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.
Peter Kreeft
#4. 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.
Peter Kreeft
#5. Prayer is easier than we think. we want to think it is too hard or too high and holy for us, because that gives us an excuse for not doing it. This is false humility. We can all do it, even the most sinful, shallow, silly, and stupid of us.
Peter Kreeft
#6. With every choice we move either closer to God or farther away from him.
Peter Kreeft
#7. Even David Hume, one of history most famous skeptics, said it's just barely possible that God exists.
Peter Kreeft
#8. When a maniac is at the door, feuding brothers reconcile.
Peter Kreeft
#9. Your heart may be paltry compared with the heart of a great saint, but your heart is what God wants from you.
Peter Kreeft
#10. the instinct Rousseau found in himself and followed: the instinct to deceive, rob, and seduce rich ladies and to abandon his own children.
Peter Kreeft
#11. A habit is a stable disposition to act in a certain way, good or evil. Virtues are good habits; vices are bad habits.
Peter Kreeft
#12. The only reason you are not yet a saint is because you do not wholly want to be one ...
Peter Kreeft
#13. God really performs the miracle of multiplying our time, but only if we give it to him first.
Peter Kreeft
#15. When the soul no longer conforms to the will of God, the body no longer conforms to the will of the soul.
Peter Kreeft
#16. If you place [your bet] with God, you lose nothing, even if it turns out that God does not exist. But if you place it against God, and you are wrong and God does exist, you lose everything.
Peter Kreeft
#17. You have an evil twin who is always with you. He is called your ego.
Peter Kreeft
#18. One moment of prayer, of weak worship, confused contrition, tepid thanksgiving, or pitiful petition will bring us closer to God than all the books of theology in the world.
Peter Kreeft
#19. So two things, on our part, are required to receive God's saving grace: repentance from sin and faith in God Who saves us (by grace, in Christ). Both are free choices, and both are necessary to allow grace to enter our souls.
Peter Kreeft
#20. To many moderns, [love] is something that is only a part of us rather than something of which we are a part.
Peter Kreeft
#21. It is mercy, not justice or courage or even heroism, that alone can defeat evil.
Peter Kreeft
#22. If God is not a Trinity, God is not love. For love requires three things: a lover, a beloved, and a relationship between them.
Peter Kreeft
#23. Scholastics called the "irascible" (averting) and "concupiscible" (attracting) emotions.
Peter Kreeft
#24. We try too much and trust too little. Count the times God's Book tells us to "try." Now count the times it tells us to "trust.
Peter Kreeft
#25. 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.
Peter Kreeft
#26. The only way God can strengthen his presence in our will is to weaken his presence in our feelings. Otherwise we would become spiritual cripples, unable to walk without emotional crutches. This is why he gives us dryness, sufferings, and failures.
Peter Kreeft
#27. In essentials, unity; in inessentials, diversity; in all things, charity.
Peter Kreeft
#28. Pride looks down, and no one can see God but by looking up.
Peter Kreeft
#29. That's what's so striking about the title of Kushner's book: When Bad Things Happen to Good People. How is that fair?
Well, the answer to that is that there are no good people.
Peter Kreeft
#30. Now if the religious skeptic is right, we can know nothing about God. And if we can know nothing about God, how can we know God so well that we can know that he cannot be known? How can we know that God cannot and did not reveal himself - and perhaps even through human reason?
Peter Kreeft
#31. 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.
Peter Kreeft
#32. 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.
Peter Kreeft
#33. Reason alone cannot give you a whole steak, but it sure helps with identifying bologna.
Peter Kreeft
#34. Presumption and despair are opposite deadly sins. We hear a lot about despair, and the need for hope; but what is presumption?
Peter Kreeft
#35. A man walking through a wall is a miracle. A man both walking and not walking through a wall at the same time and in the same respect is a contradiction. God can perform miracles but not contradictions - not because his power is limited, but because contradictions are meaningless.
Peter Kreeft
#36. I guarantee you that after you die you will not say 'I spent too much time praying; I wish I had watched more TV instead.
Peter Kreeft
#37. What we do in our parishes and homes contributes to what Christ is doing: preparing the Second Coming. That is the final meaning of our daily work.
Peter Kreeft
#38. It is possible to love one's friend for another reason than God, whereas God is the only reason for loving one's enemy.
Peter Kreeft
#39. 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
Peter Kreeft
#40. Pride is really very simple. It is the attitude of the spoiled brat: "I want what I want when I want it, and if you say No to me, I hate you." "Thy will be done" is the essential prayer of the saint; "my will be done" is the essential demand of the sinner.
Peter Kreeft
#41. 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.
Peter Kreeft
#42. 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.
Peter Kreeft
#43. Why contraception is not only wrong but sacrilegious:
Peter Kreeft
#44. Moral relativism says morality is relative, not absolute, I want to show moral relativism, in its popular form, is logically incoherent.
Peter Kreeft
#45. Wisdom, which is the habit of distinguishing appearance from reality.)
Peter Kreeft
#46. God calls us, just as he called Abraham, away from the security we knew, out of our old, familiar, little room, down the ladder of faith and into his arms. Jesus called his disciples that way - just as a lover elopes with his beloved.
Peter Kreeft
#47. 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.
Peter Kreeft
#48. Sacraments are like hoses. They are the channels of the living water of God's grace. Our faith is like opening the faucet. We can open it a lot, a little, or not at all.
Peter Kreeft
#49. Now in giving honor to one's parents or to the gods, as indeed the Philosopher says, it is impossible to repay them measure for measure; but it suffices that man repay as much as he can, for friendship does not demand measure for measure, but what is possible.
Peter Kreeft
#50. One of the few things in life that cannot possibly do harm in the end is the honest pursuit of the truth.
Peter Kreeft
#51. Love suffers far more for the pains of the beloved than for its own pains.
Peter Kreeft
#52. 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.
Peter Kreeft
#53. Actually, we have misdefined "hypocrisy." Hypocrisy is not the failure to practice what you preach but the failure to believe it. Hypocrisy is propaganda.
Peter Kreeft
#54. Christianity is God's marriage proposal to the soul.
Peter Kreeft
#55. (4) But only man knows consciously and rationally, and only man's loves can be conscious and rational and responsible through free will.
Peter Kreeft
#56. Many saints were made out of passionate sinners - the angry, the hating, the lustful, the cynical; but none were ever made out of the slothful.
Peter Kreeft
#57. No culture in history has ever embraced moral relativism and survived. Our own culture, therefore, will either (1) be the first, and disprove history's clearest lesson, or (2) persist in its relativism and die, or (3) repent of its relativism and live. There is no other option.
Peter Kreeft
#58. the contemplative life not only does not exclude, but requires, the active life.
Peter Kreeft
#60. 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.
Peter Kreeft
#61. 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.
Peter Kreeft
#62. We cannot hate truth in general, all truth, as we cannot hate food in general, all food. But we can hate a particular truth even though it is good for us, as we can hate a particular food even though it is good for us:
Peter Kreeft
#63. Not all Tolkien haters are Orcs, but all Orcs are Tolkien haters.
Peter Kreeft
#64. What is voluntary comes from the will; what is forced comes to the will from outside and prevents it from doing what it will.
Peter Kreeft
#65. shows how fruitful analogies can be - not in proving points but in illustrating them, showing spiritual truths by means of material images.
Peter Kreeft
#66. Being a Christian is more like having your soul possessed by a spirit than having your mind clothed with new beliefs ... It is like being haunted by the Holy Ghost.
Peter Kreeft
#67. are more like Dog and Cat and Bird than like Lassie and Fido and Spot. Therefore,
Peter Kreeft
#68. When I ask my "Catholic" students what they would say to God if they died tonight and God asked them why He should let them into Heaven, fewer than 5% ever even mention Jesus Christ.
Peter Kreeft
#69. Every gift requires two freedoms: the giver's and the receiver's.
Peter Kreeft
#70. Only saints can save the world. And only our own sins can stop us from being saints.
Peter Kreeft
#71. 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.
Peter Kreeft
#72. Other religions are stories of man's search for God. The Bible is the story of God's search for man.
Peter Kreeft
#73. It is just as crazy not to be crazy about Christ as it is to be crazy about anything else.
Peter Kreeft
#74. For the wise men of old, the cardinal problem of human life was how to conform the soul to objective reality, and the solution was wisdom, self-discipline, and virtue. For the modern, the cardinal problem is how to conform reality to the wishes of man, and the solution is a technique.
Peter Kreeft
#75. Dulia is like a high but finite number; hyperdulia is like the highest number out of a finite number of finite numbers; latria is like infinity.
Peter Kreeft
#76. Therefore if we lack the feeling of repentance but nevertheless want to repent; if we choose repentance with the will; we are then repenting, since repentance is that choice of the will.
Peter Kreeft
#77. 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.
Peter Kreeft
#78. Thus, though Christians are in no way bound by the Jewish ceremonial or civil laws (because they were all in some way preparatory for Christ), we are still under the Ten Commandments in one way, though not in two other ways.
Peter Kreeft
#79. Whoever marries the spirit of the times must soon become a widower.
Peter Kreeft
#80. The idea of resolving conflicts by killing people (which is what war is) is not a just thing, a just idea. In that sense there is no such thing as "just war". But to wage a given war may be a just action.
Peter Kreeft
#81. Suppose the god, the goal of progress, is changing. Then progress becomes impossible. How could we progress toward a goal that keeps receding? How could a runner make progress toward a finish line if someone kept moving it as he ran?
Peter Kreeft
#83. Agape is the catalyst that makes value appear in anything.
Peter Kreeft
#85. Love is the binding force on every level of existence.
Peter Kreeft
#86. A God who did not abolish suffering-worse , a God who abolished sin precisely by suffering-is a scandal to the modern mind.
Peter Kreeft
#87. Saints have to be tough as well as tender because saints are like Christ, and Christ was the toughest and the tenderest man who ever lived.
Peter Kreeft
#88. It is true, as John Bunyan said, that God infinitely prefers a heart without words to words without a heart when we pray.
Peter Kreeft
#89. I think most people who call themselves relativists are not, in practice.
Peter Kreeft
#90. Without that freedom to sin there is also no freedom to love.
Peter Kreeft
#92. The Inquisition confused sin with sinners and judged both. Modern Americans make the same mistake but judge neither.
Peter Kreeft
#93. Corruptio optimi pessima." The corruption of the best things are the worst things.
Peter Kreeft
#94. Prayer is fundamentally a transformation of will, a lifting of the heart and will to God.
Peter Kreeft
#95. 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.
Peter Kreeft
#96. Faith is not like bottled water but like rain. Its destiny is not just to be kept and held but to make something visible grow.
Peter Kreeft
#97. Every blade of grass is a blade of grace, a grace note in God's single Song. Nature is not blind and dumb. Nature is eloquent. Human science is blind and dumb if it does not hear this eloquence.
Peter Kreeft
#98. Condoms are about as effective against AIDS as a twenty-four-chamber gun instead of a six-chamber gun when playing Russian roulette.
Peter Kreeft
#100. Our destiny is to be so intimately united with God that, as the mystics say, we not only see God's face but also see with God's face.
Peter Kreeft
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