Peter Kreeft Quotes

we have that the animal does not: reason and free will, or free choice.

Pilate's skeptical sneer "What is truth?" was addressed to Truth Himself, standing there right in front of his face. The world's stupidest question was three words; God's profoundest answer was one Word.

In reality, the damned are in the same place as the saved - in reality! But they hate it; it is their Hell. The saved love it, and it is their Heaven. It is like two people sitting side by side at an opera or a rock concert: the very thing that is Heaven to one is Hell to the other. Dostoyevski says, 'We are all in paradise, but we won't see it'…Hell is not literally the 'wrath of God.' The love of God is an objective fact; the 'wrath of God' is a human projection of our own wrath upon God, as the Lady Julian saw - a disastrous misinterpretation of God's love as wrath. God really says to all His creatures, 'I know you and I love you' but they hear Him saying, 'I never knew you; depart from me.' It is like angry children misinterpreting their loving parents' affectionate advances as threats. They project their own hate onto their parents' love and experience love as an enemy - which it is: an enemy to their egotistic defenses against joy…

Since God is love, since love is the essence of the divine life, the consequence of loss of this life is loss of love...Though the damned do not love God, God loves them, and this is their torture. The very fires of Hell are made of the love of God! Love received by one who only wants to hate and fight thwarts his deepest want and is therefore torture. If God could stop loving the damned, Hell would cease to be pure torture. If the sun could stop shining, lovers of the dark would no longer be tortured by it. But the sun could soone

If a government is built on the principle of benevolence similar to that of a father towards his children, that is, a paternal government . . . , in which subjects are treated like children who have not yet come of age and who cannot distinguish what is truly beneficial from what is harmful for them . . . this is the greatest despotism imaginable. . . . Not a paternal but a patriotic government . . . is the only government conceivable for human beings who are capable of rights. (OCS)

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.

Life is a quest for love and a quest for god, and there is no car or plane for this trip. it is an old-fashioned quest made on our own two feet.

Don't confuse scepticism as an attitude, or a method, with scepticism as a philosophy. Socrates was sceptical in temperament, and his method was to question everything. But he believed in absolute truth; he was no sceptic.

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

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

Mercy is Truth clothed; judgment is Truth naked.

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.

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.

Indifference is the only road that never gets to God.

You can be just as certain that God will give you little pieces of Heaven, little appetizers for Heaven, for the rest of your life on earth as you can be certain that He will give you the fullness of Heaven when you die.

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.

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

Christians are good citizens, and take human laws very seriously, for religious reasons, not just for secular reasons. That's why they are better citizens than atheists, and certainly better citizens than moral relativists and subjectivists: they have stronger motives for obedience.

But we will probably never see this, never move from original selfishness to universal charity and unselfishness, without the intermediate step of the family.

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!

It is the Godfather, not God the Father, who makes you an offer you can't refuse.

The solution to our suffering is our suffering!

Disbelief is a sin, but honest unbelief is not.

Atheism cheapens everything it touches - look at the results of communism, the most powerful form of atheism on earth.

We need to have the mind of a conservative and the heart of a liberal.

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.

It's just as dangerous and just as heretical to under - do as to over - do what Scripture says.

All life is an emergency.

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.

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

Humility is not an exaggeratedly low opinion of yourself. Humility is self-forgetfulness.

Argumentation is a human enterprise that is embedded in a larger social and psychological context. This context includes (1) the total psyches of the two persons engaged in dialogue, (2) the relationship between the two persons, (3) the immediate situation in which they find themselves and (4) the larger social, cultural and historical situation surrounding them.

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.

The opposite of Christianity is not atheism, but idolatry.

No story is more beautiful than the Gospel, even though it is a story full of pain and nails and hate and blood and sin and murder and betrayal and forsakenness and unimaginable agony and death. It is the story of what happens to the most beautiful thing, Perfect Love, when it enters our world: it comes to a Cross, to the crossroad between good and evil. All our most beautiful stories are like the Gospel: they are tragedies first, and then comedies; they are crosses and then crowns. They are crosses because they are conflicts between good and evil. That is the fundamental plot of every great story. To say "that story is beautiful" means "that story resembles the Gospel." If you are bored by the Gospel, that puts no black eye on the Gospel, but on you. Most likely, it means you have never listened to it. You must have heard it, but hearing is far from the same thing as listening ...

You see, passion alone is a blind power. It's fire without light. It just ignites whatever it touches, good or evil, truth or lies, unselfishness or selfishness, love or lust.

We are fallen fools, most of our philosophy is not "the proper use of human reason" but the improper use of human reason.

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.

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

God loves us more than we love Him.

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.

God's love is as objective as light. Because the sun in a sense is light, or the source of light rather than being lit, it really gives its light to the earth. And because the earth really receives light from the sun, it is really transformed every morning from darkness to light. Just as objectively, because God is love, God really gives love to us. And because we receive real life-changing love from God, we are really transformed from darkness to light.

Tempting is not forcing.

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

I strongly suspect that if we saw all the difference even the tiniest of our prayers to God make, and all the people those little prayers were destined to affect, and all the consequences of those effects down through the centuries, we would be so paralyzed with awe at the power of prayer that we would be unable to get up off our knees for the rest of our lives.

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.

(That's why contraception is wrong by nature: it's a limit, a "Wait! Hold! No! Not quite! We won't give each other Everything")

After a lifetime in academia, I have discovered that there is only one requirement for someone to actually believe any of the one hundred most absurd ideas possible for a human mind to conceive: you must be an intellectual. Some ideas are so ridiculous that only a Ph.D. could believe them.

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.

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.

Marriage is earth's closest image for Heaven because it is all or nothing, forever - a leap of faith.

The purpose of Purgatory is to completely internalize, in your own individual soul, what Christ has completely accomplished in objective reality in His Passion. Nothing

It is much easier to fail to love your parents than to fail to love your children. That is why there is a commandment that commands love and respect to parents, but not to children. In an age of abortion, there ought to be an eleventh commandment against neglecting, harming, abusing, or even murdering your own children.

It is why God created matter, most of all the human body, which has the greatest power to make spirit visible. (Thus the philosopher Wittgenstein, asked what a human soul could possibly look like, answered, "Like a human body.")

We do not do good works to get into heaven; we do good works because heaven has gotten to us.

Pride looks down, and no one can see God but by looking up.

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.

are more like Dog and Cat and Bird than like Lassie and Fido and Spot. Therefore,

I think most people who call themselves relativists are not, in practice.

I want to give moral relativism the good spanking it deserves.

Moral relativism has a reputation for being compassionate, caring and humane, but it is an extremely useful philosophy for tyrants.

Things look different when history is seen as His-story.

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

Peace is a mark of the Holy Spirit.

The Church has always had a conservative head and a liberal heart, and the world has never understood her, just as it never understood Christ.

God created the possibility of evil; people actualized that potentiality. The source of evil is not God's power but mankind's freedom. Even an all-powerful God could not have created a world in which people had genuine freedom and yet there was no potentiality for sin, because our freedom includes the possibility of sin within its own meaning.

Christ is the Word of God, the answer of God. All the words of the prophets, philosophers, and poets are echoes of this Word. In

Sin comes from not realizing God's love. Sin comes from thinking ourselves only as sinners, while overcoming sin comes from thinking ourselves as overcomers. We act our our perceived identities.

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.

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.

Sin has made us stupid, so that we can only learn the hard way.

Why contraception is not only wrong but sacrilegious:

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.

The root of most atheism i not argument but attitude, not itellection but feeling, not the love of truth but the fear of truth.

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

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.

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.

Ethics without virtue is an illusion. What is the highest purpose of ethics? It is to make a person good, that is virtuous.

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.

It hardly ever attaches to any other sin except one, and is never heard from any organized group of people except one.

The nature of a voluntary act, whose principle needs to be in itself;

If a person claims to have met Jesus without being changed then they have not met the real Jesus.

If anyone doubts its infallible conclusion, he infallibly shows that he has never really performed the experiment.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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 ...

When the soul no longer conforms to the will of God, the body no longer conforms to the will of the soul.

The person who is committing the sin of sloth may be doing nothing visible that is wrong. Yet he is rejecting the presence of God, refusing the joy of love.

What is voluntary comes from the will; what is forced comes to the will from outside and prevents it from doing what it will.

The Lutheran alternative to the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation which is called consubstantiation, in which the bread and wine are not changed but added to, so that Christ becomes really present along with them but they remain.

Great stories give us the grace of a mystical experience, on the level of the imagination.

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

As society grows, it knows more and more about less and less. It knows more about the little things and less about the big things. It knows more about everything and less about Everything.

With every choice we move either closer to God or farther away from him.

The civilization you sit in ... is now obvious in crisis, perhaps death pangs, twisting grotesquely like a dying animal, swirling down the garbage drain-this civilization was founded on God's road map.

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.

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.

Human fathers give human life, animal fathers give animal life, God the Father gives divine life. It's called grace.

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?