Peter Kreeft Quotes

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

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

~ Peter Kreeft

We can't avoid reasoning, we can only avoid doing it well.

~ Peter Kreeft

This is the secret of life: the self lives only by dying, finds its identity (and its happiness) only by self-forgetfulness, self-giving, self-sacrifice, and agape love.

~ Peter Kreeft

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

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

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

The rich fop Francis of Assisi was bored all his life―until he fell in love with Christ and gave all his stuff away and became the troubadour of Lady Poverty.

~ Peter Kreeft

Saint Thomas Aquinas says, wisely, that the only way to drive out a bad passion is by a stronger good passion. The same is true of thoughts as of passions. When your mind wanders, like a child, your will must bring it back, like a mother. [. . .] The will-parent must discipline the mind-child, avoiding both the opposite extremes commonly made in disciplining either children or thoughts: tyranny or permissiveness.

~ Peter Kreeft

By the way, if you get mad at your Mac laptop and wonder who designed this demonic device, notice the manufacturer's icon on top: an apple with a bite out of it.

~ Peter Kreeft

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

~ Peter Kreeft

Those who meet Jesus always experience either joy or its opposites, either foretastes of Heaven or foretastes of Hell. Not everyone who meets Jesus is pleased, and not everyone is happy, but everyone is shocked.

~ Peter Kreeft

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

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

~ Peter Kreeft

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

~ Peter Kreeft

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

~ Peter Kreeft

Love gives you eyes.

~ Peter Kreeft

It is reasonable to love the Absolute absolutely for the same reason it is reasonable to love the relative relatively.

~ Peter Kreeft

Violence is spiritual junk food, and boredom is spiritual anorexia.

~ Peter Kreeft

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

Stand in the divine rain, and seeds of wisdom will grow in your soul.

~ Peter Kreeft

The connection between art and Christ is like the connection between sunlight and the sun. It is, in fact, the connection between Sonlight and the Son.

~ Peter Kreeft

Honesty is a moral virtue, a matter of the will. Honesty means willing the truth with the whole of your heart. This demands sacrifice. We have little hope of attaining honesty unless we realize how demanding it is. It demands sacrifice of self-will, self-image, the desire to win, and the comfort of being right.The “honesty” often praised today is usually only emotional honesty with others, not intellectual honesty with one’s self; only “letting it all hang out,” not asking what is the real truth. Sometimes “honesty” is only a code word for shamelessness. Rarely does it mean the absolute, fanatical, selfless love of truth.

~ Peter Kreeft

Morality means choice. Choice means priorities. Priorities mean a hierarchy. A hierarchy means something at the top, a standard. That is the greatest good. If you have no greatest good, you have no hierarchy, you have no priorities. If you have no priorities, you cannot make intelligent choices. If you cannot make intelligent moral choices, you have no morality. You can still guide your life by your feelings or by social fashions, but that is not choice – not free, responsible, moral choice. Both feelings and fashions push you; you are passive. But moral choice is your own doing; you are active. You are responsible for your choices but not for your feelings or for your environment’s fashions.

~ Peter Kreeft

One of the few things in life that cannot possibly do harm in the end is the honest pursuit of the truth.

~ Peter Kreeft

We can't believe what we believe to be untrue, and we can't love what we believe to be unreal.

~ Peter Kreeft

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.

~ Peter Kreeft

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

Protestants believe that the sacraments are like ladders that God gave to us by which we can climb up to Him. Catholics believe that they are like ladders that God gave to Himself by which He climbs down to us.

~ Peter Kreeft

Conscience is thus explained only as the voice of God in the soul.

~ Peter Kreeft

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

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

God really performs the miracle of multiplying our time, but only if we give it to him first.

~ Peter Kreeft

Nothing but prayer can make saints because nothing but God can make saints, and we meet God in prayer. Prayer is the hospital for souls where we meet Doctor God.

~ Peter Kreeft

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

If we rely on anything else besides faith to maintain the practice of the presence of God, we will certainly fail, whether this is our feelings, or experiences, or sincerity, or good intentions, or reasonings, or plans. The reason these things will fail while faith will not fail is that all these things depend on us, while faith depends on God. It is a gift of God.

~ Peter Kreeft

Only is a bird doesn't swim in the ocean but flies in the air can it enter the ocean from above, only because God is not temporal can he enter into time.

~ Peter Kreeft

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

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).

~ Peter Kreeft

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