Kreeft Quotes

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. ~ Peter Kreeft

Abortion is the insurance against that fate worse than death which is called a family. ~ Peter Kreeft

Control language and you control thought; control thought and you control action; control action and you control the world. ~ Peter Kreeft

We pray to obey God, not to 'play God'. We pray, not to change God's mind, but to change our own; not to command God, but to let God command us. We pray to 'let God be God'. Prayer is our obedience to God even when it asks God for things, for God has commanded us to ask (Mt. 7:7). ~ Peter Kreeft

The six things in life that never get boring are knowing and loving God, your neighbor, and yourself. ~ Peter Kreeft

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

The Church also seems to be in the social service business, the counseling business, the fundraising business, the daycare business-dozens of the same worthy businesses the secular world is also in. Why? What justifies these things? The Church's ultimate end for all these things is different from the world's end; it is salvation. This is its distinctive "product."
Why put out a product that is just the same as other compa-
vies' products already on the market? Why would anyone expect such a product to sell? That's why modernist or liberal Christianity, charitable as its services are, is simply not selling. The only reason for any of the Church's activities, the only reason for the very existence of the Church at all, is exactly the same as the reason Jesus came to earth: to save poor and lost humanity. ~ Peter Kreeft

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. ~ Peter Kreeft

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

The opposite of Christianity is not atheism, but idolatry. ~ Peter Kreeft

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

Socrates: So was I.
Bertha: Are you saying you're as great as him, then?
Socrates: No, no, on the contrary, I'm assuming just the opposite! ~ Peter Kreeft

Gratitude is the seedbed of joy. ~ Peter Kreeft

Life is hard, but death is even harder. ~ Peter Kreeft

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

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

Indifference is the only road that never gets to God. ~ Peter Kreeft

Delight is a subjective reason for praying, but it is a valid one. ~ Peter Kreeft

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

The single most important piece of advice about prayer is one word: Begin! ~ Peter Kreeft

murder and adultery are great crimes. ~ Peter Kreeft

Only Judaism and Christianity are religions of public record, eyewitnessed facts. ~ Peter Kreeft

A classic is like a cow: it gives fresh milk every morning. A classic is a book that rewards endlessly repeated reading. A classic is like the morning, like nature herself: ever young, ever renewing. No, not even like nature, for she, like us, is doomed to die. Only God is ever young, and only the Book he inspired never grows old. ~ Peter Kreeft

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

High and holy ambition
to be a saint
is not opposed to holy humility
total reliance on God's grace. Exactly the opposite. Ambition without humility is ambition that fails. It is pride, which goes before a fall (Prov 16:18). Humility without ambition is false humility. ~ Peter Kreeft

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

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

Mercy is Truth clothed; judgment is Truth naked. ~ Peter Kreeft

Other possible means were not lacking on God's part." One drop of blood - from Christ's circumcision at the age of eight days - would have been sufficient to purchase all mankind's salvation. Why then did He give us twelve quarts instead of one drop? The simple and stunning answer, from Monica Miller's book on the movie "The Passion of the Christ", is: Because He had twelve quarts to give. The strategy of war and of games is to win with the minimum possible expense and sacrifice. Love does not seek the minimum but the maximum. ~ 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

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

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

There - fore what is contrary to human nature is contrary to God's will. ~ Peter Kreeft

The church is: a conspiracy of love for a dying world, a spy mission into enemy occupied territory ruled by the powers of evil; a prophet from God with the greatest news the world has ever heard, the most life changing and most revolutionary institution that has existed on earth. ~ Peter Kreeft

The root of pride is found to consist in man not being in some way subject to God and His rule. ~ Peter Kreeft

We sin because we see sin as a bargain. We unconsciously calculate that it's worth it, that it pays. ~ Peter Kreeft

If God is the Creator of all things and evil is a thing, then God is the Creator of evil and He is to be blamed for its existence. No, evil is not a thing but a wrong choice, or the damage done by a wrong choice. Evil is no more a positive thing than blindness is, but it is just as real. ~ Peter Kreeft

the way in which He worked miracles, namely because He worked miracles . . . of His own power, and not by praying (petitioning), as others do. . ~ Peter Kreeft

All life is an emergency. ~ Peter Kreeft

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

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. ~ Peter Kreeft

Adoration will heal our Church and thus our nation and thus our world ... Adoration touches everyone and everything ... [because it touches the Creator, Who touches everything and everyone] ... When we adore, we plug into infinite dynamism and power. Adoration is more powerful for construction than nuclear bombs are for destruction ~ Peter Kreeft

How will the Tower of Babel be undone? How will we understand each other in Heaven? Will we all speak English or Dutch or Latin? No, we will speak music. ~ Peter Kreeft

The quantity comes from the efficient cause but the quality comes from the formal cause. ~ Peter Kreeft

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

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

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. ~ Peter Kreeft

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

Envy, though not the greatest sin, is the only one that gives the sinner no pleasure at all, not even fake and temporary satisfaction. ~ Peter Kreeft

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

The block of marble is not the sculptor, and doesn't see that he's about to become a masterpiece ... We're the block of marble and God is the sculptor, and the chisel is ... everything. ~ Peter Kreeft

Peace is a mark of the Holy Spirit. ~ Peter Kreeft

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

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

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

America does not know the difference between money and sex. It treats sex like money because it treats sex as a medium of exchange, and it treats money like sex because it expects its money to get pregnant and reproduce. ~ Peter Kreeft

Only God is to be loved for His own sake. Everything else is to be loved for God's sake. ~ Peter Kreeft

That freedom is lost in Hell. ~ Peter Kreeft

God wants us to worry about our sins before we sin; the devil wants us to worry after we sin. God wants us to feel free after we repent (for we really are free then); the devil is a deceiver). The devil tempts us to cavalier pride before we sin and worrisome despair afterward, since pride and despair both separate us from God, and anything that separates us from God is the devil's friend and our enemy, while anything that brings us close to God is the devil's enemy and our friend. ~ Peter Kreeft

Our only qualitifcation for God's grace is our emptiness, not our fullness; our undeservingness, not our deservingness. ~ Peter Kreeft

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

But God loves men more than angels in intensity, because He became one of us, ~ Peter Kreeft

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. ~ 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

Reading a book about something can be an obstacle to doing it because it gives you the impression that you are doing what you are only thinking about doing. It is tempting to remain in the comfortable theater of our imagination instead of the real world, to fall in love with the idea of becoming a saint and loving God and neighbor instead of doing the actual work, because the idea makes no demands on you. It is like a book on a shelf. But, as Dostoyevsky says, 'love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared to love in dreams' (The Brothers Karamazov). ~ Peter Kreeft

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. ~ Peter Kreeft

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

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

Aristotelian hylomorphic anthropology of soul and body as form and matter of a single substance, as distinct from a Platonic or Cartesian two-substance dualism, or simple materialism or simple immaterialism or spiritualism. All three alternatives to Aristotelian-Thomistic hylomorphism are logically problematic as well as not in accord with our experience. ~ Peter Kreeft

The only reason you are not yet a saint is because you do not wholly want to be one ... ~ Peter Kreeft

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. ~ Peter Kreeft

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

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. ~ Peter Kreeft

Science only answers the question, How does it work? Or at most, What's there? Science asks what and how, philosophy asks why, myth and religion ask who. Who's in charge here? Who's the author? That's what we really long to know. ~ 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

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. ~ Peter Kreeft

The eye of the poet sees less clearly, but sees farther than the eye of the scientist. ~ Peter Kreeft

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

The solution to our suffering is our suffering! ~ Peter Kreeft

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. ~ Peter Kreeft

Brother Lawrence says, in The Practice of the Presence of God, 'There is not in the world a kind of life more sweet and delightful than that of a continual conversation with God. Those only can comprehend it who practice and experience it' (Letter 5). No one who has ever tried it has ever given it a lesser rating than that. For even though our prayer-contact with God may be almost infinitely poor, the God we thus contact is infinitely rich! Therefore, 'we are to be pitied who content ourselves with so little. God has infinite treasure to bestow' (Letter 4). What is that? 'What no eye has seen, nor ear heard, not the heart of man conceived, what God has prepared for those who love him' (1 Cor 2:9). ~ Peter Kreeft

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. ~ Peter Kreeft

If one Egyptian tailor hadn't cheated on the threads of Joseph's mantle, Potiphar's wife would never have been able to tear it, present it as evidence to Potiphar that Joseph attacked her, gotten him thrown in prison, and let him be in a position to interpret Pharaoh's dream, win his confidence, advise him to store seven years of grain, and save his family, the seventy original Jews from whom Jesus came. We owe our salvation to a cheap Egyptian tailor. ~ Peter Kreeft

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

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. ~ Peter Kreeft

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

Atheism is cheap on people, because it snobbishly says nine out of ten people through history have been wrong about God and have had a lie at the core of their hearts. ~ Peter Kreeft

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. ~ Peter Kreeft

Life is always fatal. No one gets out of it alive ~ Peter Kreeft

Socrates: "Know thyself." For Socrates, there are only two kinds of people: the wise, who know they are fools; and fools, who think they are wise. Similarly, for Christ and all the prophets, there are only two kinds of people: saints, who know they are sinners; and sinners, who think they are saints. ~ Peter Kreeft

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. ~ Peter Kreeft

All of history is a kind of broken marriage and God puts it back together again. ~ Peter Kreeft

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.") ~ Peter Kreeft

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. ~ Peter Kreeft

The fires of hell may be made of the very love of God, experienced as torture by those who hate him: the very light of God's truth, hated and fled from in vain by those who love darkness. ~ Peter Kreeft

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

We modern egalitarians are tempted to the primal sin of pride in the opposite way from the ancients. The old, aristocratic form of pride was the desire to be better than others. The new, democratic form is the desire not to have anyone better than yourself. It is just as spiritually deadly and does not even carry with it the false pleasure of gloating superiority. ~ Peter Kreeft

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

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

Our attempts at charity without God, our attempts at charity before faith and hope, all fail because they are based on ourselves and our own false sufficiency and our own righteousness as their foundation and cause. But the charity that comes after faith is God's own work in and through us, and is part of our own salvation. ~ Peter Kreeft