Peter Kreeft famous quotes

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

#Opposites #Atheism #Christianity

In an age that has thrown off all tradition, the only rebellion possible is orthodoxy.
-- Peter Kreeft

#Faith #Inspiration #Age

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

#Nice #Hero #Heart

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

#Faith #Inspiration #Heart

Kindness-mere kindness-cannot tolerate suffering. Love can.
-- Peter Kreeft

#Love #Kindness #Suffering

Remembering the facts of death and Heaven gives us an even more pressing reason to learn to pray: We do not have an infinite amount of time. We are one day nearer Home today than we ever were before. 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

#Home #Giving #Heaven

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

#Christian #Life Changing #Evil

I strongly suspect that if we saw all the difference even the tiniest of our prayers make, and all the people those...prayers were destined to affect...we would be so paralyzed with awe...that we would be unable to get up off our knees for the rest of our lives.
-- Peter Kreeft

#Prayer #Differences #People

Listening to other people's needs is listening to God. Noticing simple, natural beauty, hearing music, even confronting the challenge of pain and problems - that can all be listening to God too.
-- Peter Kreeft

#Pain #Simple #People

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

#Lessons #Firsts #Culture

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

#Water #Grace #Littles

The womb is like an altar, it's the place where God continually comes into the world and does what only God can do...create.
-- Peter Kreeft

#Doe #World #Womb

There is one and only one possible road to joy: selfless love.
-- Peter Kreeft

#Faith #Inspiration #Joy

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

#Catholic #Three #Lovers

In an age of relativism, orthodoxy is the only possible rebellion left
-- Peter Kreeft

#Age #Orthodoxy #Rebellion

An argument in apologetics, when actually used in dialogue, is an extension of the arguer. The arguer's tone, sincerity, care, concern, listening, and respect matter as much as his or her logic - probably more. The world was won for Christ not by arguments but by sanctity: "What you are speaks so loud, I can hardly hear what you say.
-- Peter Kreeft

#Listening #World #Care

The closer we are to God, to divine attributes - such as absolute truth, goodness, and beauty - the more we wonder. When we separate ourselves from truth, goodness, and beauty, we lose wonder and become cynical. The Enlightenment was basically the narrowing of our vision to a purely scientific, empirical, rationalistic worldview, screwing down the manhole covers on us so we became squinting underground creatures.
-- Peter Kreeft

#Squinting #Cynical #Vision

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

#Faith #Inspiration #Believe

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

#Powerful #Our World #Church

We are all insane. That is what original sin means. Sin is insanity. It is preferring finite joy to infinite joy, creatures to the Creator, an unhappy, Godless self to a happy, God-filled self Only God can save us from this disease. That is what the name "Jesus" means: 'God saves'.
-- Peter Kreeft

#Jesus #Mean #Names

Joy is not a feeling in us. Joy does not enter into us. We enter into joy: "Enter into the joy of your Lord" (Mt 25:21).
-- Peter Kreeft

#Joy #Feelings #Doe

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

#May #Goodness #Unlimited

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

#Two #Evil #Maps

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

#Purpose #Ethics #Illusion

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

#Faith #Law #Four

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

#Bored #Poverty #Stuff

Your heart is like an infinitely large hole, and only God is big enough to fill it.
-- Peter Kreeft

#Faith #Inspiration #Heart

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

#Sacrifice #Self #Giving

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

#Faith #Jesus #Inspiration

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

#Powerful #Evil #People

An open mind is not an end in itself but a means to the end of finding truth.
-- Peter Kreeft

#Mean #Mind #Ends

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

#Jesus #Opposites #Joy

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

#Doe #Turns #God Does Exist

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....
-- Peter Kreeft

#Faith #Inspiration #Growth

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

#Humility #Self #Catholic

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

#Inspirational #Motivational #Icons

We can't avoid reasoning; we can only avoid doing it well.
-- Peter Kreeft

#Wells

If you love, you will suffer. The only way to protect yourself against suffering is to protect yourself against love - and that is the greatest suffering of all, loneliness.
-- Peter Kreeft

#Faith #Loneliness #Inspiration

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

#Faith #Inspiration #Heart

Lack of prayer is the cause of lack of time.
-- Peter Kreeft

#Prayer #Catholic #Causes

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

#Psych #Two #Historical

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

#Honesty #Harm #Pursuit

You have to say no to something else, in order to make time to pray.
-- Peter Kreeft

#Order #Catholic #Praying

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

#Atheist #Lying #Heart

When you give yourself away you find that a new and more real self has somehow been given to you.
-- Peter Kreeft

#Real #Self #Giving

The opposite of theism is not atheism, it’s idolatry
-- Peter Kreeft

#Opposites #Atheism #Theism

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

#Depression #Night #Men

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

#Faith #Husband #Real

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.
-- Peter Kreeft

#World #Faces #Three

Indifference is more truly the opposite of love than hate is, for we can both love and hate the same person at the same time, but we cannot both love and be indifferent to the same person at the same time.
-- Peter Kreeft

#Hate #Opposites #Indifference

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

#Mind #Suffering #Scandal

Violence is spiritual junk food, and boredom is spiritual anorexia.
-- Peter Kreeft

#Spiritual #Boredom #Anorexia

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

#Kings #Prayer #Mean

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

#Religious #Reason #Skeptic

We are artists, because God is.
-- Peter Kreeft

#Artist

Someone once said that if you sat a million monkeys at a million typewriters for a million years, one of them would eventually type out all of Hamlet by chance. But when we find the text of Hamlet, we don't wonder whether it came from chance and monkeys. Why then does the atheist use that incredibly improbable explanation for the universe? Clearly, because it is his only chance of remaining an atheist. At this point we need a psychological explanation of the atheist rather than a logical explanation of the universe.
-- Peter Kreeft

#Atheist #Typewriters #Years

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

#Heart #Men #Turns

It is just as crazy not to be crazy about Christ as it is to be crazy about anything else.
-- Peter Kreeft

#Crazy #Christ #Being Crazy

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

#Crazy #Shakes #Jesus Shock

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

#Pain #Opposites #Interesting

Why would the apostles lie?....Liars always lie for selfish reasons. If they lied, what was their motive, what did they get out of it? What they got out of it was misunderstanding, rejection, persecution, torture, and martyrdom. Hardly a list of perks!
-- Peter Kreeft

#Selfish #Liars #Lying

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

#Art #Son #Sun

Now suppose both death and hell were utterly defeated.  Suppose the fight was fixed.  Suppose God took you on a crystal ball trip into your future and you saw with indubitable certainty that despite everything — your sin, your smallness, your stupidity — you could have free for the asking your whole crazy heart’s deepest desire: heaven, eternal joy.  Would you not return fearless and singing?  What can earth do to you, if you are guaranteed heaven?  To fear the worst earthly loss would be like a millionaire fearing the loss of a penny — less, a scratch on a penny.
-- Peter Kreeft

#Crazy #Heart #Loss

The national anthem of hell is, "I Did It My Way."
-- Peter Kreeft

#Religion #Way #Anthem

Christ transforms the meaning and value of suffering from something to be feared or at best endured into something redemptive [and transformative].
-- Peter Kreeft

#Suffering #Christ #Values

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

#Sleep #Apes #Oxymoron

Forgiveness is the reason for the crucifixion, and the crucifixion is the reason for the Incarnation.
-- Peter Kreeft

#Reason #Incarnation #Crucifixion

Be egalitarian regarding persons. Be elitist regarding ideas.
-- Peter Kreeft

#Ideas #Elitist #Persons

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

#Evil #Judgement #Doe