Top 300 Peter Kreeft Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “In an age that has thrown off all tradition, the only rebellion possible is orthodoxy.”

— Peter Kreeft

102. “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

103. “Thanksgiving comes after Christmas.”

— Peter Kreeft

104. “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

105. “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

106. “God calls us, just as he called Abraham, away from the security we knew, out of our old, familiar, little room, down the ladder of faith and into his arms. Jesus called his disciples that way – just as a lover elopes with his beloved.”

— Peter Kreeft

107. “The person who is committing the sin of sloth may be doing nothing visible that is wrong. Yet he is rejecting the presence of God, refusing the joy of love.”

— Peter Kreeft

108. “True love, unlike popular sentimental substitutes, is willing to suffer. Love is not “luv.” Love is the cross. Our problem at first, the sheer problem of suffering, was a cross without Christ. We must never fall into the opposite and equal trap of a Christ without a cross.”

— Peter Kreeft

109. “Our only qualitifcation for God’s grace is our emptiness, not our fullness; our undeservingness, not our deservingness.”

— Peter Kreeft

110. “The love of God is no human projection, but the wrath of God is. In fact, what we call the wrath of God is really the love of God experienced by a fool.”

— Peter Kreeft

111. “The more consciously and freely we choose an evil, the more responsible we are for it and the more guilty we are of it; this is why spiritual sins like pride are greater in guilt than carnal sins.”

— Peter Kreeft

112. “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.”

— Peter Kreeft

113. “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

114. “How you approach the problem of suffering depends on how you approach life itself. There are only two ways. Either meaning is surrounded by matter, or matter is surrounded by meaning.”

— Peter Kreeft

115. “Violence is spiritual junk food, and boredom is spiritual anorexia.”

— Peter Kreeft

116. “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

117. “If you want to get wet, go out to where it is raining; If you want to be a saint, find one and hang out with him.”

— Peter Kreeft

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

— Peter Kreeft

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

— Peter Kreeft

120. “Not all Tolkien haters are Orcs, but all Orcs are Tolkien haters.”

— Peter Kreeft

121. “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.”

— Peter Kreeft

122. “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.”

— Peter Kreeft

123. “Corruptio optimi pessima.” The corruption of the best things are the worst things.”

— Peter Kreeft

124. “Pride looks down, and no one can see God but by looking up.”

— Peter Kreeft

125. “I strongly suspect that if we saw all the difference even the tiniest of our prayers to God make, and all the people those little prayers were destined to affect, and all the consequences of those effects down through the centuries, we would be so paralyzed with awe at the power of prayer that we would be unable to get up off our knees for the rest of our lives.”

— Peter Kreeft

126. “If we had absolute proof instead of clues, then you could no more deny God than you could deny the sun. If we had no evidence at all, you could never get there. God gives us just enough evidence so that those who want him can have him.”

— Peter Kreeft

127. “Agape is the catalyst that makes value appear in anything.”

— Peter Kreeft

128. “The perennial temptation is to creep under the angel’s flaming sword, to try to create a heaven on earth.”

— Peter Kreeft

129. “If you didn’t believe in objective truth, arguments would be just toys, or games, or jokes.”

— Peter Kreeft

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

— Peter Kreeft

131. “Don’t be more serious than God. God invented dog farts.”

— Peter Kreeft

132. “He offers total mercy and forgiveness to all who will accept it by trusting Him and repenting of their sins, but He does not, and cannot, give forgiveness to those who will not receive His gift. Gifts are freely given and freely received. Heaven cannot be forced on a creature with free will.”

— Peter Kreeft

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

— Peter Kreeft

134. “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.”

— Peter Kreeft

135. “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.”

— Peter Kreeft

136. “We can’t avoid reasoning; we can only avoid doing it well.”

— Peter Kreeft

137. “Humility, humility, humility, and humility.”

— Peter Kreeft

138. “Indifference is the only road that never gets to God.”

— Peter Kreeft

139. “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

140. “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

141. “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.”

— Peter Kreeft

142. “It is the Godfather, not God the Father, who makes you an offer you can’t refuse.”

— Peter Kreeft

143. “Reason is flawless, de jure, but reasoners are not, de facto.”

— Peter Kreeft

144. “If we seek the truth without realizing how far we are from it, we will be dogmatists. If we realize how far we are from the truth but do not seek it, we will be skeptics. If we both seek the truth and realize how far we are from it, we will be wise.”

— Peter Kreeft

145. “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.”

— Peter Kreeft

146. “A fundamental principle of Catholic theology is that grace perfects nature rather than setting it aside; and that means that the Christian life is not a two-layer cake, the supernatural simply added on to the natural. It transforms the natural but by perfecting it, not by demeaning it.”

— Peter Kreeft

147. “If you truly love God and His will, then doing what you will, will, in fact, be doing what God wills.”

— Peter Kreeft

148. “We cannot go from our darkness to his light, because we are working in the dark. But God can go from his light to our darkness, because he is working in the light.”

— Peter Kreeft

149. “Plato was right when he said that all evil comes from ignorance. He forgot that ignorance also comes from evil.”

— Peter Kreeft

150. “In every sin, we choose to believe the devil’s lie rather than God’s truth.”

— Peter Kreeft