Peter Kreeft > Quotes

“In an age of hope men looked up at the night sky and saw “the heavens." In an age of hopelessness they call it simply “space.”
― Peter Kreeft

“The heart is like a woman, and the head is like a man, and although man is the head of woman, woman is the heart of man, and she turns man's head because she turns his heart.”
― Peter Kreeft, Jesus-Shock

“Cats don't need to be possessed; they're evil on their own.”
― Peter Kreeft

“Our culture has filled our heads but emptied our hearts, stuffed our wallets but starved our wonder. It has fed our thirst for facts but not for meaning or mystery. It produces "nice" people, not heroes.”
― Peter Kreeft, Jesus-Shock

“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, Jesus-Shock

“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, Jesus-Shock

“America does not know the difference between money and sex. It treats sex like money because it treats sex as a medium of exchange, and it treats money like sex because it expects its money to get pregnant and reproduce.”
― Peter Kreeft, How to Win the Culture War: A Christian Battle Plan for a Society in Crisis

“This is the secret of life: the self lives only by dying, finds its identity (and its happiness) only by self-forgetfulness, self-giving, self-sacrifice, and agape love.”
― Peter Kreeft, Jesus-Shock

“The national anthem of Hell is 'I did it my way.”
― Peter Kreeft

“If you place [your bet] with God, you lose nothing, even if it turns out that God does not exist. But if you place it against God, and you are wrong and God does exist, you lose everything.”
― Peter Kreeft, Pocket Handbook of Christian Apologetics

“We can't avoid reasoning; we can only avoid doing it well.”
― Peter Kreeft, Pocket Handbook of Christian Apologetics

“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, Before I Go: Letters to Our Children about What Really Matters

“The most total opposite of pleasure is not pain but boredom, for we are willing to risk pain to make a boring life interesting.”
― Peter Kreeft, Jesus-Shock

“One of the few things in life that cannot possibly do harm in the end is the honest pursuit of the truth.”
― Peter Kreeft, Pocket Handbook of Christian Apologetics

“The very first step is to try to forget about the self altogether. He [C.S. Lewis] says elsewhere that that's the very definition of humility. Humility does not mean to have a low view of your self. It means to have no view of yourself. Having a low view of yourself is miserable--psychologists know that. And that's also the solution to the problem of introspection. If I ask myself, how am I doing, I come out with one of three answers: well, terribly, or so-so.

If I say I'm doing well, I'm a proud, self-righteous, arrogant, self-satisfied, priggish Pharisee; if I say I'm doing lousy, I'm a miserable worm with a guilt complex and I need some psychiatry; and if i say I'm sort of fair to midland then I'm dull, wishy-washy, Charlie Brown. So what's the solution? Don't look at yourself. Take your temperature when you're sick, otherwise look at other people and God. They're much more interesting. The first step is to try to forget about yourself altogether. Your real self, your new self, will not come as long as you are looking for it. It will come only when you're looking for Him.”
― Peter Kreeft

“We all, like Frodo, carry a Quest, a Task: our daily duties. They come to us, not from us. We are free only to accept or refuse our task- and, implicitly, our Taskmaster. None of us is a free creator or designer of his own life. "None of us lives to himself, and none of us dies to himself" (Rom 14:7). Either God, or fate, or meaningless chance has laid upon each of us a Task, a Quest, which we would not have chosen for ourselves. We are all Hobbits who love our Shire, or security, our creature comforts, whether these are pipeweed, mushrooms, five meals a day, and local gossip, or Starbucks coffees, recreational sex, and politics. But something, some authority not named in The Lord of the Rings (but named in the Silmarillion), has decreed that a Quest should interrupt this delightful Epicurean garden and send us on an odyssey. We are plucked out of our Hobbit holes and plunked down onto a Road.”
― Peter Kreeft, The Philosophy of Tolkien: The Worldview Behind The Lord of the Rings

“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, Prayer for Beginners

“Love gives you eyes.”
― Peter Kreeft, Jesus-Shock

“Everything smaller than Heaven bores us because only Heaven is bigger than our hearts.”
― Peter Kreeft, Jesus-Shock

“An argument in apologetics, when actually used in dialogue, is an extension of the arguer. The arguer's tone, sincerity, care, concern, listening, and respect matter as much as his or her logic - probably more. 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, Pocket Handbook of Christian Apologetics

“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, Jesus-Shock

“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

“Trusting God's grace means trusting God's love for us rather than our love for God. […] Therefore our prayers should consist mainly of rousing our awareness of God's love for us rather than trying to rouse God's awareness of our love for him, like the priests of Baal on Mount Carmel (1 Kings 18:26-29).”
― Peter Kreeft, Prayer for Beginners

“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, Jesus-Shock

“We can't believe what we believe to be untrue, and we can't love what we believe to be unreal.”
― Peter Kreeft, Pocket Handbook of Christian Apologetics

“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, Jesus-Shock

“Reading a book about something can be an obstacle to doing it because it gives you the impression that you are doing what you are only thinking about doing. It is tempting to remain in the comfortable theater of our 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. It is like a book on a shelf. But, as Dostoyevsky says, 'love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared to love in dreams' (The Brothers Karamazov).”
― Peter Kreeft, Prayer for Beginners

“It is mercy, not justice or courage or even heroism, that alone can defeat evil.”
― Peter Kreeft, The Philosophy of Tolkien: The Worldview Behind The Lord of the Rings

“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, Prayer for Beginners

“Pilate's skeptical sneer "What is truth?" was addressed to Truth Himself, standing there right in front of his face. The world's stupidest question was three words; God's profoundest answer was one Word.”
― Peter Kreeft, Jesus-Shock