Peter Kreeft Quotes

79 Sourced Quotes

Sin comes from not realizing God's love. Sin comes from thinking ourselves only as sinners, while overcoming sin comes from thinking ourselves as overcomers. We act our our perceived identities.

Peter Kreeft
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
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
At exactly the time when the fatal knowledge of how to destroy the entire human race has fallen forever into out hands, the knowledge of morality has fallen out.

Peter Kreeft
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.

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

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

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

Peter Kreeft
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.

Peter Kreeft
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.

Peter Kreeft
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.

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

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

Peter Kreeft
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:

Peter Kreeft
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.

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

Peter Kreeft
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.

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

Peter Kreeft
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.

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
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
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
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