Peter Kreeft Quotations

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.

The most compelling evidence for God's existence is Christ. If God does not exist, then Christ was the biggest fool who ever lived.

All human beings have a right to life. Our unborn children are members of the human race. They're human beings, so they have a right to life.

God's interventions are miracles: events that cannot happen by merely natural agents but only by a supernatural agent. They no more interfere with our free will than natural events like earthquakes. We choose how to respond to them.

God allows unjust disparities between rich and poor because He does not miraculously intervene to establish justice against human wills. Also, discrepancies are not unjust by themselves; justice does not mean equality of result but equality of opportunity.

Our life here on Earth has as its purpose precisely to prepare for our eternal happiness. This world is a large womb. It is a 'test' as all opportunities are tests.

A woman has a responsibility and a privilege that a man doesn't have of given birth to another human being.

You don't have to convince Muslims of God's existence or importance.

Life is hard, but death is even harder.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Humility, humility, humility, and humility.

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

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

When feminists become saints, we will become their pupils.

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

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

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

If there is a God, there is a map. If God has a map, his map is the true map.

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.

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

The scripture notion of truth is not an abstract, static, and timeless formula, but is something that comes true in time as the fulfillment of a divine promise. Truth happens in history.

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

A woman has a responsibility and a privilege that a man doesnt have of given birth to another human being.

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

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

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

When I say "The good man gave his good dog a good meal," I use "good" analogically, for there is at the same time a similarity and a difference between a good man, a good dog, and a good meal. All three are desirable, but a good man is wise and moral, a good dog is tame and affectionate, and a good meal is tasty and nourishing. But a good man is not tasty and nourishing, except to a cannibal; a good dog is not wise and moral, except in cartoons, and a good meal is not tame and affectionate, unless it's alive as you eat it.

Most theists are deists most of the time, in practice if not in theory. They practice the absence of God instead of the presence of God.

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

Christianity is God's marriage proposal to the soul.

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.

Every blade of grass is a blade of grace, a grace note in God's single Song. Nature is not blind and dumb. Nature is eloquent. Human science is blind and dumb if it does not hear this eloquence.

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

Prayer is like Thanksgiving dinner. It takes one hour to eat it and ten hours to prepare it.

You cannot be in love with love.

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

Peace is a mark of the Holy Spirit.

The self is like a baseball. Throw it back to the divine pitcher who pitched it to you in the first place, and the game of love goes on. Hold it, and the game is over. That is the difference between Heaven and Hell.

Like white light refracted through a prism and split into many colors, God's eternal love-nature, expressed through the prism of time, becomes God's multicolored love story. History is His story.

There is no effective rational answer to the challenge: "But give me a reason why I should love someone who does not deserve it." Love is the highest thing. There can be no higher reason to justify it.

Without that freedom to sin there is also no freedom to love.

When we believe that God is something other than a lover, it is inevitable that we will sin.

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.

God's wraith is really only the face of love refused.

But how can we love someone if we don't like him? Easy-we do it to ourselves all the time. We don't always have tender, comfortable feelings about ourselves; sometimes we feel foolish, stupid, asinine, or wicked. But we always love ourselves: we always seek our own good. Indeed, we feel dislike toward ourselves, we berate ourselves, precisely because we love ourselves; because we care about our good, we are impatient with our bad.

God is love. Wraith is how His love appears to us when we sin or rebel or run away from Him. The very light that is meant to help us appears to us as our enemy when we seek the darkness.

A pure heart means a single heart, a heart in which only one desire lives: love.

The love of God is no human projection, but the wrath of God is. In fact, what we call the wrath of God is really the love of God experienced by a fool.

To God each one of us is His favorite. God's love comes to all, but it comes to all as each, not to all as some anonymous aggregate.

Gratitude is the seedbed of joy.

In this deed is my hope, not in the mere timeless fact that God is love. I am saved not by the beautiful Trinitarian life of God but by the gory death of God. I am saved not by the touching of the three Persons in Heaven but by the touching of this love on the Cross to my life.

If we turn to the divine Conductor and follow the wise and loving baton that is His will, His Word, then the music of our life will be a symphony.

You see, God just will not let us flunk out of His school of love. He insists on remedial lessons until we get it right. For this whole world is a school set up by Love Himself to teach us to love.

The modern mind always tends to reduce the greater to the lesser rather than seeing the lesser as reflecting the greater.

Faith and hope bring us through time but leave us at the doorstep of eternity. Only love goes with us inside.

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

Faith is not like bottled water but like rain. Its destiny is not just to be kept and held but to make something visible grow.

Love is faith's flower, hope is its stem. Grace comes into us by faith, like water through the roots of a tree. It rises in us by hope, like sap rising through the trunk of a tree. And it matures in us by [love] as fruit matures on a tree's branches, fruit for the neighbor's eating.

Indifference is the only road that never gets to God.

Faith is the root, the necessary beginning. Hope is the stem, the energy that makes the plant grow. Love is the fruit, the flower, the visible product, the bottom line. The plant of our new life in Christ is one; the life of God comes into us by faith, through us by hope, and out of us by the works of love.

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

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.

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

Forgiveness is the reason for the crucifixion, and the crucifixion is the reason for the Incarnation.

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.

God is not pre or post anything. He is present to everything. ... There is not predestination but destination, not predestiny but destiny. This follows from divine omniscience and eternity.

We cannot hate truth in general, all truth, as we cannot hate food in general, all food. But we can hate a particular truth even though it is good for us, as we can hate a particular food even though it is good for us:

To those of you who would classify yourselves as conservatives I would say, meditate long and hard on Jesus' saying "Whatever you do to the least of these you have done to me".

Do you know any better way to make saints than to be one yourself?

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.

Saints have to be tough as well as tender because saints are like Christ, and Christ was the toughest and the tenderest man who ever lived.

Great saints are never wimps.

Socrates: So even our walks are dangerous here. But you seem to have avoided the most dangerous thing of all. Bertha: What's that? Socrates: Philosophy. Bertha: Oh, we have philosophers here. Socrates: Where are they? Bertha: In the philosophy department. Socrates: Philosophy is not department. Bertha: Well, we have philosophers. Socrates: Are they dangerous? Bertha: Of course not. Socrates: Then they are not true philosophers.

Subtract miracles from Islam, Buddhism, Confucianism, or Toaism, and you have essentially the same religion left. Subtract miracles from Christianity, and you have nothing but the cliches and platitudes most American Christians get weekly (and weakly) from their pulpits.

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!

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.

Humility is the marriage bond of Heaven. Pride is the frigidity of Hell.

It is said that there are three sources of evil, "the world, the flesh, and the Devil"; but the world and the flesh would be innocent were it not for the Devil.

A saint isn't somebody who tries harder, but someone who trusts more.

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

Of course the more you love the sinner the more you hate and make war on the sin, just as the more you love the person, the more you hate and kill the cancer cells that are killing the person. Compassion for cancer cells does not come from compassion for persons; it comes precisely from lack of compassion for persons.

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.

A man walking through a wall is a miracle. A man both walking and not walking through a wall at the same time and in the same respect is a contradiction. God can perform miracles but not contradictions - not because his power is limited, but because contradictions are meaningless.

Live in robust sanity, in holy obedience to the ordinary." (The Message) "In an insane asylum like the world, simple sanity can be a heroic achievement.

Americans' deepest religion is often equality. The notion that Christ alone is God-superior, authoritative, supernatural-and that Christ's teaching and person is far greater than Buddha's, or Muhammad's, or Moses's, no matter how much great and good wisdom may be contained in those others, is scandalous.

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