Top 300 Peter Kreeft Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 6 of 7

251. “There is no effective rational answer to the challenge: “But give me a reason why I should love someone who does not deserve it.” Love is the highest thing. There can be no higher reason to justify it.”

— Peter Kreeft

252. “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

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

— Peter Kreeft

254. “Feelings, like waves, look more substantial than they are.”

— Peter Kreeft

255. “Man’s soul has three powers, and God left him prophets for all three: Jewish moralists for his will, Greek philosophers for his mind, and pagan mythmakers for his heart and imagination and feelings. Of course, the latter two are not infallible.”

— Peter Kreeft

256. “We can’t believe what we believe to be untrue, and we can’t love what we believe to be unreal.”

— Peter Kreeft

257. “You cannot be in love with love.”

— Peter Kreeft

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

— Peter Kreeft

259. “Even though we hate some of the things we do or feel, we hate them only because we love ourselves. We feel we are unworthy of such bad stuff.”

— Peter Kreeft

260. “Only saints can save the world. And only our own sins can stop us from being saints.”

— Peter Kreeft

261. “Don’t be more serious than God. God invented dog farts. God designed your body’s plumbing system. God designed an ostrich. If He didn’t do it, He permitted a drunken angel to do it. Empirical facts can add significantly to the meaning of “being godlike”.”

— Peter Kreeft

262. “Every gift requires two freedoms: the giver’s and the receiver’s.”

— Peter Kreeft

263. “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

264. “The solution to our suffering is our suffering!”

— Peter Kreeft

265. “God makes it easy to begin: just do it! God also makes it easy to progress in prayer, for he rewards our efforts with peace and joy. And he makes it easiest of all at the end, for it gradually becomes more natural and delightful.”

— Peter Kreeft

266. “St. Thomas is as practical and plain and reasonable in ethics as Aristotle, or Confucius, or your uncle.”

— Peter Kreeft

267. “Whoever marries the spirit of the times must soon become a widower.”

— Peter Kreeft

268. “For even though our prayer-contact with God may be almost infinitely poor, the God we thus contact is infinitely rich!”

— Peter Kreeft

269. “Only is a bird doesn’t swim in the ocean but flies in the air can it enter the ocean from above; only because God is not temporal can he enter into time.”

— Peter Kreeft

270. “Like apes, we breed, sleep, and die. Yet like God we say, “I am.” We are ontological oxymorons.”

— Peter Kreeft

271. “The root reason for this is the denial of the human essence, the human equality, the human family – judging people’s worth only by how efficiently or intelligently or quickly they function. This is confusing the essence with the nonessential.”

— Peter Kreeft

272. “In this deed is my hope, not in the mere timeless fact that God is love. I am saved not by the beautiful Trinitarian life of God but by the gory death of God. I am saved not by the touching of the three Persons in Heaven but by the touching of this love on the Cross to my life.”

— Peter Kreeft

273. “What distinguishes the saved from the damned is their relation to Christ. This is not St. Thomas’ opinion, this is Christ’s own clear teaching. What.”

— Peter Kreeft

274. “It’s the most essential thing of all just because it’s not a matter of how you do it at all, but of whether you do it. Like being born, or cooking: how you do it is less important than whether you do it. You can find thousands of books on prayer that give you methods of praying, hundreds of “hows”; but they do you no good at all unless you actually pray. Otherwise it’s like reading a cookbook instead of cooking. You can’t eat a cookbook!”

— Peter Kreeft

275. “Each angel is inferior or superior to every other angel. From the fact that angels are pure spirits it logically follows that they are unequal.”

— Peter Kreeft

276. “Right Response to Reality – the Three R’s – is the fundamental principle of morality, of sanctity, and of sanity.”

— Peter Kreeft

277. “If I did not love you more today than I did yesterday, I would love you less, and that is intolerable. So I must find more ways to love you every day.”

— Peter Kreeft

278. “I think most people who call themselves relativists are not, in practice.”

— Peter Kreeft

279. “When I ask my “Catholic” students what they would say to God if they died tonight and God asked them why He should let them into Heaven, fewer than 5% ever even mention Jesus Christ.”

— Peter Kreeft

280. “Yes, organized religion is a crutch. You mean you didn’t know that you are a cripple? If you don’t know that, then you are a very serious cripple indeed, mentally and spiritually.”

— Peter Kreeft

281. “Hell is not populated mainly by passionate rebels but by nice, bland, indifferent, respectable people who simply never gave a damn.”

— Peter Kreeft

282. “The major heresies of our day are not about God but about man.”

— Peter Kreeft

283. “Expect the world to be Heaven, and it will feel like Hell. Expect it to be Purgatory, and it will feel like Heaven. The two most salient facts about Purgatory are pain and hope, suffering and meaning.”

— Peter Kreeft

284. “Even saints do not smile sweetly when God throws them into mud puddles. Only pigs do that.”

— Peter Kreeft

285. “Paradoxically, sloth reigns most in our technologically busy world where leisure has been abolished and life has been programmed and scheduled down to the last detail.”

— Peter Kreeft

286. “God loves good men more than bad men, as He loves angels more than men.”

— Peter Kreeft

287. “I often thought of comparing life to a dream, because death always seemed to be an awakening.”

— Peter Kreeft

288. “Charity transcends mere virtue. Yet once this charity exists, it fulfills all virtue, as the New Law fulfills the Old and as grace fulfills nature. Charity is the heart and soul of all virtue.”

— Peter Kreeft

289. “In essentials, unity; in inessentials, diversity; in all things, charity.”

— Peter Kreeft

290. “Conservatives often seem afraid of questions and liberals afraid of answers – which is even sillier, because that’s like being afraid of food. Being afraid of questions is like being afraid of hunger. That’s only cowardice.”

— Peter Kreeft

291. “No happiness on earth can be deeper than the happiness that comes from our willing and active submission to God’s will even when he wills suffering.”

— Peter Kreeft

292. “We too can love with the will even when we do not have loving emotions or feelings. We make this distinction toward ourselves quite easily, so we should be able to do it toward others too when necessary.”

— Peter Kreeft

293. “Faith is like a rock; feelings are like waves.”

— Peter Kreeft

294. “Every good choice makes the next one easier and more delightful.”

— Peter Kreeft

295. “Disbelief is a sin, but honest unbelief is not.”

— Peter Kreeft

296. “Christ deliberately hides Himself, disguises Himself, gives no physical sign of His Real Presence in the Eucharist, for a crucially important purpose: to test and elicit and strengthen our faith. If we saw miraculous signs in every Eucharist, or if the Eucharistic bread and wine had no taste, like other bread and wine, or even if we felt unique feelings each time we received the Eucharist, our faith would be less strong because it would have sensible or emotional crutches to lean on.”

— Peter Kreeft

297. “Since God writes history as man writes words, the literal events of history can be signs of other truths just as human words are signs of things other than themselves.”

— Peter Kreeft

298. “St. Thomas thus detects a primary source of presumption in seeking genuinely good things, like human happiness on earth, as if we did not need divine grace to attain them; and in the hope that we can obtain God’s pardon and mercy without our confessing and repenting of sin.”

— Peter Kreeft

299. “It is tempting to remain in the comfortable theater of the imagination instead of the real world, to fall in love with the idea of becoming a saint and loving God and neighbor instead of doing the actual work, because the idea makes no demands on you.”

— Peter Kreeft

300. “The difference between a counsel and a commandment is that a commandment implies obligation, whereas a counsel is left to the option of the one to whom it is given.”

— Peter Kreeft