Top 300 Peter Kreeft Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “Haven’t you forgotten the first and most important lesson in all of philosophy, the lesson taught to all of us by Socrates, the father of philosophy? That you are wise only when you are humble, that the very first bit of wisdom and the prerequisite for all others is the realization that we are not wise.”

— Peter Kreeft

152. “Those who know, do not say; those who say, do not know.”

— Peter Kreeft

153. “Reason alone cannot give you a whole steak, but it sure helps with identifying bologna.”

— Peter Kreeft

154. “I want to give moral relativism the good spanking it deserves.”

— Peter Kreeft

155. “We make a big deal out of Christmas; we should make an even bigger deal out of March 25. The greatest event in history, the Incarnation, happened at the Annunciation, not the Nativity.”

— Peter Kreeft

156. “God continuously comes into the world in two places – at the altar and in the womb.”

— Peter Kreeft

157. “Prayer is like Thanksgiving dinner. It takes one hour to eat it and ten hours to prepare it.”

— Peter Kreeft

158. “Faith is not like bottled water but like rain. Its destiny is not just to be kept and held but to make something visible grow.”

— Peter Kreeft

159. “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

160. “God gives us not only the truth but also the ability to believe it; not only the new thing to see but also the new eye to see it with.”

— Peter Kreeft

161. “Few Christians go into media or the arts today, or see it as a primary mission field or battlefield. But it is.”

— Peter Kreeft

162. “Mercy is Truth clothed; judgment is Truth naked.”

— Peter Kreeft

163. “To God each one of us is His favorite. God’s love comes to all, but it comes to all as each, not to all as some anonymous aggregate.”

— Peter Kreeft

164. “God is love. Wraith is how His love appears to us when we sin or rebel or run away from Him. The very light that is meant to help us appears to us as our enemy when we seek the darkness.”

— Peter Kreeft

165. “City of God interprets all of the human story, from Creation to the Last Judgment, as the drama of divine providence and human free choice, especially the choice between the two most fundamental options of membership in one or the other of the “two cities.” The City of God is the invisible community of all who love God; the City of the World is all those who love the world and themselves as their God.”

— Peter Kreeft

166. “Atheism cheapens everything it touches – look at the results of communism, the most powerful form of atheism on earth.”

— Peter Kreeft

167. “Despair itself can be hopeful if it is honest.”

— Peter Kreeft

168. “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

169. “Humility is not an exaggeratedly low opinion of yourself. Humility is self-forgetfulness.”

— Peter Kreeft

170. “Sociologists and anthropologists tell us that religion has three dimensions: creed, code, and cult; or words, works, and worship; or theology, morality, and liturgy.”

— Peter Kreeft

171. “The rich fop Francis of Assisi was bored all his life-until he fell in love with Christ and gave all his stuff away and became the troubadour of Lady Poverty.”

— Peter Kreeft

172. “All of history is a kind of broken marriage and God puts it back together again.”

— Peter Kreeft

173. “Truth is unchanging. The principles of morality are unchanging. The human essence is unchanging. Therefore there is no hope of a New Man, Heaven on Earth, Babel Rebuilt, a Brave New World, or Superman.”

— Peter Kreeft

174. “By the way, if you get mad at your Mac laptop and wonder who designed this demonic device, notice the manufacturer’s icon on top: an apple with a bite out of it.”

— Peter Kreeft

175. “Becoming saints is the meaning of life. It is why we exist. It is why God created us.”

— Peter Kreeft

176. “God’s solution to the problem of evil is his Son Jesus Christ. The Father’s love sent his Son to die for us to defeat the power of evil in human nature: that’s the heart of the Christian story.”

— Peter Kreeft

177. “The Inquisition confused sin with sinners and judged both. Modern Americans make the same mistake but judge neither.”

— Peter Kreeft

178. “No emotion, merely as an emotion, is a sin, because we cannot directly control the arising of an emotion in our soul.”

— Peter Kreeft

179. “Feelings come to us, passively; love comes from us, actively, by our free choice.”

— Peter Kreeft

180. “We must pray in order to grow, and we must grow because Infinite Love will not, cannot, settle for less than the greatest joy of which his beloved creature is capable.”

— Peter Kreeft

181. “When you’re in a burning building looking out of the twentieth story window down to the street and all you see is clouds of billowing smoke, you have to choose to believe the firemen below who tell you they have a safety net and it’s safe to jump. When the clouds of smoke disappear, you don’t have to believe any more: you see it. In this world, it’s a leap in the dark; in the next world, it’s a leap in the light.”

— Peter Kreeft

182. “There are only two persons you can never, ever escape, not for one moment, either in time or in eternity: God and yourself.”

— Peter Kreeft

183. “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

184. “Marriage is earth’s closest image for Heaven because it is all or nothing, forever – a leap of faith.”

— Peter Kreeft

185. “A man walking through a wall is a miracle. A man both walking and not walking through a wall at the same time and in the same respect is a contradiction. God can perform miracles but not contradictions – not because his power is limited, but because contradictions are meaningless.”

— Peter Kreeft

186. “Atheism robs death of meaning. And if death has no meaning, how can life ultimately have meaning? For death is the end of life. Here.”

— Peter Kreeft

187. “The more you treat someone you hate as if you loved them, the more you will find yourself loving them.”

— Peter Kreeft

188. “We sin because we see sin as a bargain. We unconsciously calculate that it’s worth it, that it pays.”

— Peter Kreeft

189. “No age has been more prone to confuse the sin with the sinner, not by hating the sinner along with the sin but by loving the sin along with the sinner. We often use “compassion” as an equivalent for moral relativism.”

— Peter Kreeft

190. “The modern mind always tends to reduce the greater to the lesser rather than seeing the lesser as reflecting the greater.”

— Peter Kreeft

191. “Go back to Socrates: “Know thyself.” For Socrates, there are only two kinds of people: the wise, who know they are fools; and fools, who think they are wise. Similarly, for Christ and all the prophets, there are only two kinds of people: saints, who know they are sinners; and sinners, who think they are saints. Which are you?”

— Peter Kreeft

192. “If there is a God, there is a map. If God has a map, his map is the true map.”

— Peter Kreeft

193. “Principles without facts are empty, but facts without principles are blind.”

— Peter Kreeft

194. “A certain participation in happiness can be had in this life, but perfect and true happiness cannot be had in this life.”

— Peter Kreeft

195. “It is true, as John Bunyan said, that God infinitely prefers a heart without words to words without a heart when we pray.”

— Peter Kreeft

196. “Life is always fatal. No one gets out of it alive.”

— Peter Kreeft

197. “Love suffers far more for the pains of the beloved than for its own pains.”

— Peter Kreeft

198. “As society grows, it knows more and more about less and less. It knows more about the little things and less about the big things. It knows more about everything and less about Everything.”

— Peter Kreeft

199. “Even David Hume, one of history most famous skeptics, said it’s just barely possible that God exists.”

— Peter Kreeft

200. “The saints, too, had wandering minds. The saints, too, had constantly to recall their constantly wandering mind-child home. They became saints because they continued to go after the little wanderer, like the Good Shepherd.”

— Peter Kreeft