Peter Kreeft Quotations | Page 2

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

Today, idols are not made of wood, stone, or brass. They are made of money, sex, and power.

Sinners think they are saints, but saints know they are sinners.

When feminists become saints, we will become their pupils.

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

Reason alone cannot give you a whole steak, but it sure helps with identifying bologna.

Humility, humility, humility, and humility.

For the wise men of old, the cardinal problem of human life was how to conform the soul to objective reality, and the solution was wisdom, self-discipline, and virtue. For the modern, the cardinal problem is how to conform reality to the wishes of man, and the solution is a technique.

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.

To many moderns, [love] is something that is only a part of us rather than something of which we are a part.

The deepest healing is the healing of the deepest wound. The deepest wound is the frustration of the deepest need. The deepest need is the need for meaning, purpose, and hope.

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.

Not all Tolkien haters are Orcs, but all Orcs are Tolkien haters.

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.

When we pray, instead of trying to produce love in our souls toward God, we should be basking in God's love for us. How foolish to stay indoors in the cold, dark little room off the self, trying to turn on the light and turn up the heat, when we can just go outside into God's glorious Sonlight and receive his rays! How silly to fuss with artificial tanning salons and lotions and lights when the Son is out!

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Actually, we have misdefined "hypocrisy." Hypocrisy is not the failure to practice what you preach but the failure to believe it. Hypocrisy is propaganda.

Life is hard, but death is even harder.

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.

Abortion is the insurance against that fate worse than death which is called a family. Our no-fault insurance has removed our responsibility for car accidents, and no-fault divorce has removed our responsibility for marriage accidents; why should abortion not be our no-fault sexual insurance policy that removes our responsibility for sex accidents?

We are insane. That is what sin is. Sanctity is identitical with sanity. It means living the truth, living in reality. Sin always substitutes unreality for reality.

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

Put the Protestant flint and the Catholic steel together, and you will kindle a fire that will burn all around the world.

Prayer is fundamentally a transformation of will, a lifting of the heart and will to God.

Scripture starts with the particular and then universalizes it. You are called to love your concrete individual neighbor and then to realize that every individual is your neighbor. The point is not to destroy concrete neighborhood in a fit of universalism but to expand the local neighborhood and embrace the universal neighborhood.

The more we realize we are loved, the more ashamed we are not to love back. The more we sin as a violation of love, not just of law, the more powerful a motive we will have to overcome it. For sin is attractive to us (otherwise we would never be attracted to it) and can be cast out only by something more attractive.

condoms are about as effective against AIDS as a twenty-four-chamber gun instead of a six-chamber gun when playing Russian roulette.

Love is the binding force on every level of existence.

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

Being a Christian is more like having your soul possessed by a spirit than having your mind clothed with new beliefs... It is like being haunted by the Holy Ghost.

Agape is the catalyst that makes value appear in anything.

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.

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

No sane person wants hell to exist. No sane person wants evil to exist. But hell is just evil eternalized. If there is evil and if there is eternity, there can be hell. If it is intellectually dishonest to disbelieve in evil just because it is shocking and uncomfortable, it is the same with hell. Reality has hard corners, surprises, and terrible dangers in it. We desperately need a true road map, not nice feelings, if we are to get home. It is true, as people often say, that "hell just feels unreal, impossible." Yes. So does Auschwitz. So does Calvary.

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.

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.

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

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

We are artists, because God is.

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.

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.

In every sin, we choose to believe the devil's lie rather than God's truth.

We sin because we see sin as a bargain. We unconsciously calculate that it’s worth it, that it pays.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

A God who did not abolish suffering-worse , a God who abolished sin precisely by suffering-is a scandal to the modern mind.

Lack of prayer is the cause of lack of time.

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

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

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.

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

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).

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."

We sinned for no reason but an incomprehensible lack of love, and He saved us for no reason but an incomprehensible excess of love.

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

When a maniac is at the door, feuding brothers reconcile.

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.

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.

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.

Diversion and indifference are the two widest roads to Hell in today's world.

There is no scientific proof that only scientific proofs are good proofs; no way to prove by the scientific method that the scientific method is the only valid method.

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.

Other religions are stories of man's search for God. The Bible is the story of God's search for man.

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.

Suffering is not blessed because it is suffering but because it is [Christ's]. Suffering is not the context that explains the cross; the cross is the context that explains suffering.

God writes the story of our lives with the pen strokes of our own free choices.

The key to faith is love. We believe only if we love. Trust is the middle term; only if we love, do we trust; and only if we trust, do we believe.

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.

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

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.

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

Great saints have often been made out of great sinners, but not one was ever made out of a wimp.

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....

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

Feelings come to us, passively; love comes from us, actively, by our free choice.

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.

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.

Every gift requires two freedoms: the giver's and the receiver's.

This is the reason why it is crucial to distinguish anger from hatred. There is a kind of anger (nonsinful kind) which...is in God himself, while hate is not in God but is in Satan. If we do not clearly distinguish anger from hatred, then we do not clearly distinguish God from Satan!

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.

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

It is the modern feminists who are the real male chauvinists, lusting for reproductive freedom (sexual irresponsibility) like playboys and demanding empowerment, that is, envying and imitating not only males, but male fools, judging inner worth by outer performance, sacrificing being for doing, finding their identity in their worldly careers, not in their inner essence, in their physical and spiritual wombs and motherhoods. This is what Karl Stern called "the flight from woman."

The secret of joy is hidden in the word itself: first J, then O, then Y: Jesus first, Others next, Yourself last.

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.

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).

Even David Hume, one of history most famous skeptics, said it's just barely possible that God exists.