Peter Kreeft Quotes

79 Sourced Quotes

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

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

Peter Kreeft
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.

Peter Kreeft
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.

Peter Kreeft
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.

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

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

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

Peter Kreeft
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.

Peter Kreeft
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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Peter Kreeft
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.

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

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
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
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.

Peter Kreeft
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.

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

Peter Kreeft