Top 300 Peter Kreeft Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “You cannot be in love with love.”

— Peter Kreeft

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

— Peter Kreeft

253. “It is just as crazy not to be crazy about Christ as it is to be crazy about anything else.”

— Peter Kreeft

254. “You don’t have to convince Muslims of God’s existence or importance.”

— Peter Kreeft

255. “Praying anywhere” can easily become “praying nowhere”, just as “praying anytime” can easily become “praying at no time”. Everything in general becomes nothing in particular”.”

— Peter Kreeft

256. “When we believe that God is something other than a lover, it is inevitable that we will sin.”

— Peter Kreeft

257. “But we will probably never see this, never move from original selfishness to universal charity and unselfishness, without the intermediate step of the family.”

— Peter Kreeft

258. “I find my data first in myself, not first in the poets. For if I did not find it in myself, I would not be able to find it in the poets.”

— Peter Kreeft

259. “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

260. “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

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

— Peter Kreeft

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

— Peter Kreeft

263. “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

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

— Peter Kreeft

265. “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

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

— Peter Kreeft

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

— Peter Kreeft

268. “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

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

— Peter Kreeft

270. “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

271. “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

272. “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

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

— 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. “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

276. “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

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

— Peter Kreeft

278. “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

279. “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

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

— Peter Kreeft

281. “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

282. “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

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

— Peter Kreeft

284. “In fact, educated people can justify sins more easily than uneducated people can, because they are clever enough to rationalize their sins away.”

— Peter Kreeft

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

— Peter Kreeft

286. “The meaning of life is to become a saint.”

— Peter Kreeft

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

— Peter Kreeft

288. “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

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

— Peter Kreeft

290. “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

291. “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

292. “The transformation of Christ’s bodily scars into badges of glory shows us what happens, even in this life, to our souls when we lovingly and trustingly offer our sufferings to Christ and unite them to His. He turns “deformity” into “dignity”.”

— Peter Kreeft

293. “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

294. “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

295. “Human fathers give human life, animal fathers give animal life, God the Father gives divine life. It’s called grace.”

— Peter Kreeft

296. “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

297. “He came. That is the salient fact, the towering truth, that alone keeps us from putting a bullet through our heads. He came.”

— Peter Kreeft

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

— Peter Kreeft

299. “Not all the truths of faith can be proved by reason, but all arguments against the truths of faith can be disproved by reason.”

— Peter Kreeft

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

— Peter Kreeft