Top 300 Peter Kreeft Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “The modern mind always tends to reduce the greater to the lesser rather than seeing the lesser as reflecting the greater.”

— Peter Kreeft

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

— Peter Kreeft

203. “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

204. “St. Thomas would have agreed with Leon Bloy, who often wrote that in the end there is only one tragedy in life: not to have been a saint.”

— Peter Kreeft

205. “Your heart may be paltry compared with the heart of a great saint, but your heart is what God wants from you.”

— Peter Kreeft

206. “We want to complexify our lives. We don’t have to, we want to. We want to be harried and hassled and busy. Unconsciously, we want the very thing we complain about. For if we had leisure, we would look at ourselves and listen to our hearts and see the great gaping hole in our hearts and be terrified, because that hole is so big that nothing but God can fill it.”

— Peter Kreeft

207. “If we turn to the divine Conductor and follow the wise and loving baton that is His will, His Word, then the music of our life will be a symphony.”

— Peter Kreeft

208. “The true philosopher lives his life as a dress rehearsal for death.”

— Peter Kreeft

209. “Philosophy says truth, literature shows truth.”

— Peter Kreeft

210. “God loves us more than we love Him.”

— Peter Kreeft

211. “A great story must have, first of all, a good plot, a great deed, a good work, something worth doing. You cannot write a great story about saving a button on a sweater and nothing more. You can, however, write a great story about saving the world, which is what Tolkien did.”

— Peter Kreeft

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

— Peter Kreeft

213. “That freedom is lost in Hell.”

— Peter Kreeft

214. “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

215. “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

216. “The connection between art and Christ is like the connection between sunlight and the sun. It is, in fact, the connection between Sonlight and the Son.”

— Peter Kreeft

217. “A saint isn’t somebody who tries harder, but someone who trusts more.”

— Peter Kreeft

218. “Feelings are wonderful decorations, but they are not a foundation to build on.”

— Peter Kreeft

219. “The most striking feature if this map is the stark fat of the Two Roads. There is the road that leads to Life, and there is the road that leads to Death. There is Good, and there is Evil. There is Right and there is Wrong.”

— Peter Kreeft

220. “The greatest Christians in history seem to say that their sufferings ended up bringing them the closest to God – so this is the best thing that could happen, not the worst.”

— Peter Kreeft

221. “Third, it can mean deep, wondering reverence, or “awe” at something immeasurably superior. This is an emotion that is much rarer today than ever before in the history of the world, probably because modern life is so full of scientific knowledge and technological power over nature that we live in a dream of arrogant cleverness and a cocoon of predictable comforts.”

— Peter Kreeft

222. “Learning to pray is dress rehearsal for eternal life.”

— Peter Kreeft

223. “No books is more fascinating than the Bible. And no books are less fascinating than most of our commentaries on the Bible. Nothing is more formidable and unconquerable than the Church Militant. But nothing is more sleepy and sheepish than the Church Mumbling. Christ’s words roused His enemies to murder and His friends to martyrdom. Our words reassure both sides and send them to sleep. He put the world in a daze. We put it in a doze.”

— Peter Kreeft

224. “The single most important piece of advice about prayer is one word: Begin!”

— Peter Kreeft

225. “The root of most atheism i not argument but attitude, not itellection but feeling, not the love of truth but the fear of truth.”

— Peter Kreeft

226. “A God made in the world’s image can’t save the world.”

— Peter Kreeft

227. “Delight is a subjective reason for praying, but it is a valid one.”

— Peter Kreeft

228. “Atheism is cheap on people, because it snobbishly says nine out of ten people through history have been wrong about God and have had a lie at the core of their hearts.”

— Peter Kreeft

229. “Do you know any better way to make saints than to be one yourself?”

— Peter Kreeft

230. “You have to say no to something else, in order to make time to pray.”

— Peter Kreeft

231. “When feminists become saints, we will become their pupils.”

— Peter Kreeft

232. “The good Jew, like the good Christian, sees behind the law to the Lawgiver, whose will is perfect love.”

— Peter Kreeft

233. “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

234. “Only God is to be loved for His own sake. Everything else is to be loved for God’s sake.”

— Peter Kreeft

235. “We can and should investigate and learn from the wisdom in other religions.”

— Peter Kreeft

236. “You see, passion alone is a blind power. It’s fire without light. It just ignites whatever it touches, good or evil, truth or lies, unselfishness or selfishness, love or lust.”

— Peter Kreeft

237. “Love is strengthened and perfected by suffering. Couples who have had only ease lack depth. True love needs to suffer. “The course of true love never did run smooth.” Kindness – mere kindness – cannot tolerate suffering. Love can.”

— Peter Kreeft

238. “The eye of the poet sees less clearly, but sees farther than the eye of the scientist.”

— Peter Kreeft

239. “Prayer is easier than we think. we want to think it is too hard or too high and holy for us, because that gives us an excuse for not doing it. This is false humility. We can all do it, even the most sinful, shallow, silly, and stupid of us.”

— Peter Kreeft

240. “Most people believe you have to have some moral absolutes if you want to hold back chaos.”

— Peter Kreeft

241. “If you are truly confident about something, you welcome honest questions about it.”

— Peter Kreeft

242. “The universal sin Saint Paul pinpoints in Romans 1:18 is to suppress the truth.”

— Peter Kreeft

243. “If your life is Christ, then your death will be only more of Christ, forever. If your life is only Christlessness, then your death will be only more Christlessness, forever. That’s not fundamentalism, that’s the law of non-contradiction.”

— Peter Kreeft

244. “The scripture notion of truth is not an abstract, static, and timeless formula, but is something that comes true in time as the fulfillment of a divine promise. Truth happens in history.”

— Peter Kreeft

245. “If we rely on anything else besides faith to maintain the practice of the presence of God, we will certainly fail, whether this is our feelings, or experiences, or sincerity, or good intentions, or reasonings, or plans. The reason these things will fail while faith will not fail is that all these things depend on us, while faith depends on God. It is a gift of God.”

— Peter Kreeft

246. “What we do is not as important as what we are. Our functionalistic modern society tends to reduce our being to our function. What is the first question we ask about someone? “What does he do?” But love never asks that question first. The first question for love is always “Who are you?” rather than “What do you do?” Being is prior to doing, and love’s realism refuses to reverse that real order.”

— Peter Kreeft

247. “We pray, not simply as some solitary self-improvement program, but because we have been addressed by God. Prayer is a response to a prior divine invitation.”

— Peter Kreeft

248. “There is no such thing as an involuntary sin.”

— Peter Kreeft

249. “Kennedy: You mean it’s not a matter of good deeds versus bad deeds, a kind of moral bookkeeping? Lewis: No indeed. Look at the thief on the cross. He made it to paradise even though his life’s red ink certainly outweighed the black. Kennedy:.”

— Peter Kreeft

250. “Only Judaism and Christianity are religions of public record, eyewitnessed facts.”

— Peter Kreeft