Top 300 Peter Kreeft Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Control language and you control thought; control thought and you control action; control action and you control the world.”

— Peter Kreeft

2. “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.”

— Peter Kreeft

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

— Peter Kreeft

4. “Trying to fill the God-sized hole in our hearts with things other than God is like trying to fill the Grand Canyon with marbles.”

— Peter Kreeft

5. “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.”

— Peter Kreeft

6. “In an age of relativism, orthodoxy is the only possible rebellion left.”

— Peter Kreeft

7. “Things look different when history is seen as His-story.”

— Peter Kreeft

8. “We are artists, because God is.”

— Peter Kreeft

9. “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

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

— Peter Kreeft

11. “On my door is a cartoon of two turtles. One says, ‘Sometimes I would like to ask why he allows poverty, famine and injustice when he could do something about it.’ The other turtle says ‘I am afraid that God might ask me the same question.’”

— Peter Kreeft

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

— Peter Kreeft

13. “There is one and only one possible road to joy: selfless love.”

— Peter Kreeft

14. “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

15. “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

16. “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.”

— Peter Kreeft

17. “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.”

— Peter Kreeft

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

— Peter Kreeft

19. “Diversion and indifference are the two widest roads to Hell in today’s world.”

— Peter Kreeft

20. “Be egalitarian regarding persons. Be elitist regarding ideas.”

— Peter Kreeft

21. “Mary’s light is like that of the moon, totally reflected from the sun, the Son of God.”

— Peter Kreeft

22. “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.”

— Peter Kreeft

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

— Peter Kreeft

24. “Gratitude is the seedbed of joy.”

— Peter Kreeft

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

— Peter Kreeft

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

— Peter Kreeft

27. “Everything smaller than Heaven bores us because only Heaven is bigger than our hearts.”

— Peter Kreeft

28. “The opposite of Christianity is not atheism, but idolatry.”

— Peter Kreeft

29. “Other religions are stories of man’s search for God. The Bible is the story of God’s search for man.”

— Peter Kreeft

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

— Peter Kreeft

31. “God writes the story of our lives with the pen strokes of our own free choices.”

— Peter Kreeft

32. “Our soul, like Mary’s body, is to receive God Himself if only we, like her, believe, consent and receive; if only we speak her truly magic word fiat, “let it be.” It is the creative word, the word God used to create the universe.”

— Peter Kreeft

33. “Christianity is God’s marriage proposal to the soul.”

— Peter Kreeft

34. “Kindness-mere kindness-cannot tolerate suffering. Love can.”

— Peter Kreeft

35. “When a maniac is at the door, feuding brothers reconcile.”

— Peter Kreeft

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

— Peter Kreeft

37. “The national anthem of hell is, “I Did It My Way.””

— Peter Kreeft

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

— Peter Kreeft

39. “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

40. “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.”

— Peter Kreeft

41. “Sinners think they are saints, but saints know they are sinners.”

— Peter Kreeft

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

— Peter Kreeft

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

— Peter Kreeft

44. “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.”

— Peter Kreeft

45. “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.”

— Peter Kreeft

46. “Life is hard, but death is even harder.”

— Peter Kreeft

47. “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.”

— Peter Kreeft

48. “Without that freedom to sin there is also no freedom to love.”

— Peter Kreeft

49. “Stand in the divine rain, and seeds of wisdom will grow in your soul.”

— Peter Kreeft

50. “Lack of prayer is the cause of lack of time.”

— Peter Kreeft