Peter Kreeft Quotes

79 Sourced Quotes

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
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.

Peter Kreeft
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!

Peter Kreeft
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
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
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
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.

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

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

Peter Kreeft
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.

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
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.

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

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

Peter Kreeft
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'.

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