Top 100 Kreeft Quotes
#1. But life here is not the end. Reality is more than we think it to be. There is another and greater reality that envelops this earthly one. Earth is not outside heaven, as the philosopher Peter Kreeft wrote; it is heaven's workshop, heaven's womb.
Gerald L. Sittser
#2. 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
#3. 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.'
Peter Kreeft
#4. Atheism robs death of meaning. And if death has no meaning, how can life ultimately have meaning? For death is the end of life. Here
Peter Kreeft
#5. Philosophy says truth, literature shows truth.
Peter Kreeft
#6. Plato was right when he said that all evil comes from ignorance. He forgot that ignorance also comes from evil.
Peter Kreeft
#7. There are only two persons you can never, ever escape, not for one moment, either in time or in eternity: God and yourself.
Peter Kreeft
#8. Great stories give us the grace of a mystical experience, on the level of the imagination.
Peter Kreeft
#9. 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
#10. Most of us know that our heart is our center, not our head. But apologetics gets at the heart through the head. The head is important precisely because it is a gate to the heart. We can love only what we know.
Peter Kreeft
#11. God allows unjust disparities between rich and poor because He does not miraculously intervene to establish justice against human wills. Also, discrepancies are not unjust by themselves; justice does not mean equality of result but equality of opportunity.
Peter Kreeft
#12. 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
#14. 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.
Peter Kreeft
#15. Even though we hate some of the things we do or feel, we hate them only because we love ourselves. We feel we are unworthy of such bad stuff.
Peter Kreeft
#16. But we will probably never see this, never move from original selfishness to universal charity and unselfishness, without the intermediate step of the family.
Peter Kreeft
#17. Mercy is Truth clothed; judgment is Truth naked.
Peter Kreeft
#18. One common cause of this mistake of preferring to imagine and admire a great ideal instead of beginning to do little deeds is our impatience with little baby steps, our lack of humility.
Peter Kreeft
#19. Christ is the Word of God in person. The Bible is the Word of God in writing. Both are the Word of God in the words of men. Both have a human nature and a divine nature.
Peter Kreeft
#20. Learning to pray is dress rehearsal for eternal life.
Peter Kreeft
#21. Delight is a subjective reason for praying, but it is a valid one.
Peter Kreeft
#22. 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
#23. We too can love with the will even when we do not have loving emotions or feelings. We make this distinction toward ourselves quite easily, so we should be able to do it toward others too when necessary.
Peter Kreeft
#24. 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
#25. A woman has a responsibility and a privilege that a man doesn't have of given birth to another human being.
Peter Kreeft
#26. With every choice we move either closer to God or farther away from him.
Peter Kreeft
#27. You don't have to convince Muslims of God's existence or importance.
Peter Kreeft
#28. when a subject corrects his prelate, he ought to do so in a becoming manner, not with impudence and harshness but with gentleness and respect. . . .
Peter Kreeft
#29. We sinned for no reason but an incomprehensible lack of love, and He saved us for no reason but an incomprehensible excess of love.
Peter Kreeft
#30. 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.
Peter Kreeft
#31. Even David Hume, one of history most famous skeptics, said it's just barely possible that God exists.
Peter Kreeft
#32. All artists are mothers. To be an artist is to be a creator, whether of a symphony or a supper or a painting or a person. Motherhood is the primary art, the art of creating (procreating) people.
Peter Kreeft
#33. The true philosopher lives his life as a dress rehearsal for death.
Peter Kreeft
#34. When a maniac is at the door, feuding brothers reconcile.
Peter Kreeft
#35. There is something in us that fears prayer as a maggot fears light. We must do violence to this voice, for it is not ourselves. It is our Enemy.
Peter Kreeft
#36. Your heart may be paltry compared with the heart of a great saint, but your heart is what God wants from you.
Peter Kreeft
#37. The single most important piece of advice about prayer is one word: Begin!
Peter Kreeft
#38. 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
#39. Live a life of love, especially the love of God, and observe the joy of it. Live a life of lovelessness and observe the joylessness of it.
Peter Kreeft
#40. The flood of love will fill all the containers to the fullest, but some containers will be larger than others.
Peter Kreeft
#41. 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
#42. Conscience is thus explained only as the voice of God in the soul.
Peter Kreeft
#43. To God each one of us is His favorite. God's love comes to all, but it comes to all as each, not to all as some anonymous aggregate.
Peter Kreeft
#44. Socrates: "The corruption of the best things are the worst things." Or, "The best, when corrupted, become the worst." As one of your English poets has said, "Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.
Peter Kreeft
#45. The best answer to the problem of evil is not one so much found on paper but on wood.
Peter Kreeft
#46. The only reason you are not yet a saint is because you do not wholly want to be one ...
Peter Kreeft
#47. We sin because we see sin as a bargain. We unconsciously calculate that it's worth it, that it pays.
Peter Kreeft
#48. God really performs the miracle of multiplying our time, but only if we give it to him first.
Peter Kreeft
#49. Christ transforms the meaning and value of suffering from something to be feared or at best endured into something redemptive [and transformative].
Peter Kreeft
#50. Humility, humility, humility, and humility.
Peter Kreeft
#52. When the soul no longer conforms to the will of God, the body no longer conforms to the will of the soul.
Peter Kreeft
#53. Moral stupidity comes in two different forms: relativism and legalism. Relativism sees no principles, only people; legalism sees no people, only principles.
Peter Kreeft
#55. De Caussade makes this matter of duty very simple, too, as he makes everything simple: "We have two duties to fulfill: we must actively seek to carry God's will into effect and passively accept all that his will sends us" (p. 73). That's all. That's it.
Peter Kreeft
#56. Perhaps even atheism versus theism is an example of this principle that an apparent either/or can really be a both/and. For I suspect that the God you insist does not exist is probably a God I also insist does not exist; and perhaps the God I maintain does exist is a God you have never denied.
Peter Kreeft
#57. 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.
Peter Kreeft
#58. All of history is a kind of broken marriage and God puts it back together again.
Peter Kreeft
#59. You have to say no to something else, in order to make time to pray.
Peter Kreeft
#60. Stand in the divine rain, and seeds of wisdom will grow in your soul.
Peter Kreeft
#61. We do not do good works to get into heaven; we do good works because heaven has gotten to us.
Peter Kreeft
#62. I want to give moral relativism the good spanking it deserves.
Peter Kreeft
#63. No one can be saved, and attain eternal joy, without all of the following: (1) a morally honest acceptance of the demands of virtue, (2) a serious effort to practice it, (3) an intellectually honest confession of failure, (4) repentance, and (5) at least an implicit faith and hope in God as Savior.
Peter Kreeft
#64. 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.
Peter Kreeft
#66. Unworthy" does not mean "undeserving", for we are all undeserving! It means "incapable of receiving.
Peter Kreeft
#67. If you didn't believe in objective truth, arguments would be just toys, or games, or jokes.
Peter Kreeft
#68. 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
#69. Most people believe you have to have some moral absolutes if you want to hold back chaos.
Peter Kreeft
#70. You have an evil twin who is always with you. He is called your ego.
Peter Kreeft
#71. 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
#72. If we turn to the divine Conductor and follow the wise and loving baton that is His will, His Word, then the music of our life will be a symphony.
Peter Kreeft
#73. 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
#74. Now I see that God prefers to work through intermediaries - Mary and the saints ... He wants us to pray through Mary and not only directly.
Peter Kreeft
#75. Original sin is the proclivity to say "my will be done" instead of "thy will be done."
Peter Kreeft
#76. To many moderns, [love] is something that is only a part of us rather than something of which we are a part.
Peter Kreeft
#77. It is mercy, not justice or courage or even heroism, that alone can defeat evil.
Peter Kreeft
#78. Humility is the marriage bond of Heaven. Pride is the frigidity of Hell.
Peter Kreeft
#79. When you give yourself away you find that a new and more real self has somehow been given to you.
Peter Kreeft
#80. 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
#81. Only when there is virtue in souls can there be peace and happiness in society.
Peter Kreeft
#82. God's wraith is really only the face of love refused.
Peter Kreeft
#83. Faith and hope bring us through time but leave us at the doorstep of eternity. Only love goes with us inside.
Peter Kreeft
#84. Scholastics called the "irascible" (averting) and "concupiscible" (attracting) emotions.
Peter Kreeft
#85. If we had absolute proof instead of clues, then you could no more deny God than you could deny the sun. If we had no evidence at all, you could never get there. God gives us just enough evidence so that those who want him can have him.
Peter Kreeft
#86. In this deed is my hope, not in the mere timeless fact that God is love. I am saved not by the beautiful Trinitarian life of God but by the gory death of God. I am saved not by the touching of the three Persons in Heaven but by the touching of this love on the Cross to my life.
Peter Kreeft
#87. 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
#88. Since we are [Christ's] body, we too are the bread that is broken for others. Our failures help heal other lives; our very tears help wipe away tears; our being hated helps those we love.
Peter Kreeft
#89. The root of pride is found to consist in man not being in some way subject to God and His rule.
Peter Kreeft
#90. Do you know any better way to make saints than to be one yourself?
Peter Kreeft
#91. We must pray in order to grow, and we must grow because Infinite Love will not, cannot, settle for less than the greatest joy of which his beloved creature is capable.
Peter Kreeft
#92. Abortion is the Antichrist's demonic parody of the eucharist. That's why it uses the same holy words, "This is my body," with the blasphemous opposite meaning.
Peter Kreeft
#93. We need to have the mind of a conservative and the heart of a liberal.
Peter Kreeft
#94. The saints, too, had wandering minds. The saints, too, had constantly to recall their constantly wandering mind-child home. They became saints because they continued to go after the little wanderer, like the Good Shepherd.
Peter Kreeft
#95. The big, blazing truth about man is that he has a heaven-sized hole in his heart, and nothing else can fill it. We pass our lives trying to fill the Grand Canyon with marbles. As Augustine said: Thou hast made us for Thyself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee.
Peter Kreeft
#96. It's just as dangerous and just as heretical to under - do as to over - do what Scripture says.
Peter Kreeft
#97. 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
#98. 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
#99. In essentials, unity; in inessentials, diversity; in all things, charity.
Peter Kreeft
#100. Be egalitarian regarding persons. Be elitist regarding ideas.
Peter Kreeft
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