Peter Kreeft quotes:

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  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.'

  • 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.

  • 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.

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

  • 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.

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

  • The national anthem of hell is, "I Did It My Way."

  • 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.

  • If God is not a Trinity, God is not love. For love requires three things: a lover, a beloved, and a relationship between them.

  • 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.

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

  • 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.

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

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

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

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

  • 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.

  • If you didn't believe in objective truth, arguments would be just toys, or games, or jokes.

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

  • 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.

  • Agape is the catalyst that makes value appear in anything.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

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

  • It is true, as John Bunyan said, that God infinitely prefers a heart without words to words without a heart when we pray.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

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

  • 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.

  • 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?

  • 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.

  • Violence is spiritual junk food, and boredom is spiritual anorexia.

  • 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.

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

  • Everything smaller than Heaven bores us because only Heaven is bigger than our hearts.

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

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Lack of prayer is the cause of lack of time.

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

  • Moral stupidity comes in two different forms: relativism and legalism. Relativism sees no principles, only people; legalism sees no people, only principles.

  • 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.

  • You have to say no to something else, in order to make time to pray.

  • Christianity is God's marriage proposal to the soul.

  • No age has been more prone to confuse the sin with the sinner, not by hating the sinner along with the sin but by loving the sin along with the sinner. We often use "compassion" as an equivalent for moral relativism.

  • Moral relativism says morality is relative, not absolute, I want to show moral relativism, in its popular form, is logically incoherent.

  • 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.

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

  • 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.

  • 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

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

  • 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'.

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

  • Don't be more serious than God. God invented dog farts. God designed your body's plumbing system. God designed an ostrich. If He didn't do it, He permitted a drunken angel to do it. Empirical facts can add significantly to the meaning of "being godlike".

  • 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!

  • 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.

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

  • 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.

  • In an age of relativism, orthodoxy is the only possible rebellion left

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

  • But that is all prayer requires: faith, hope, and love. Great holiness, or piety, or sanctity are not required. Prayer is a road to holiness.

  • Protestants believe that the sacraments are like ladders that God gave to us by which we can climb up to Him. Catholics believe that they are like ladders that God gave to Himself by which He climbs down to us.

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

  • 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.

  • Love gives you eyes.

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

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

  • 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.

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

  • 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.

  • There is something in us that fears prayer as a maggot fears light. We must do violence to this voice, for it is not ourselves. It is our Enemy.

  • 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.

  • The rich fop Francis of Assisi was bored all his lif

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • The only way God can strengthen his presence in our will is to weaken his presence in our feelings. Otherwise we would become spiritual cripples, unable to walk without emotional crutches. This is why he gives us dryness, sufferings, and failures.

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

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

  • God makes it easy to begin: just do it! God also makes it easy to progress in prayer, for he rewards our efforts with peace and joy. And he makes it easiest of all at the end, for it gradually becomes more natural and delightful.

  • 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.

  • It is mercy, not justice or courage or even heroism, that alone can defeat evil.

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

  • There is one and only one possible road to joy: selfless love.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • It was a very stupid mistake to think you could deal with heresy by burning heretics. It's the very same mistake that modernist Catholics are making today in reverse. They think you can love heretics by loving heresies.

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

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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 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.

  • 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.

  • Great saints are never wimps.

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

  • 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.

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

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

  • 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.

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

  • Abortion is the insurance against that fate worse than death which is called a family.

  • 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.

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

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

  • 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.

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

  • Be egalitarian regarding persons. Be elitist regarding ideas.

  • 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.

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