Top 263 Quotes & Sayings by Peter Kreeft - Page 2

The love of God is no human projection, but the wrath of God is. In fact, what we call the wrath of God is really the love of God experienced by a fool.

The opposite of Christianity is not atheism, but idolatry.

One of the few things in life that cannot possibly do harm in the end is the honest pursuit of the truth.

Cats don't need to be possessed; they're evil on their own.

Without that freedom to sin there is also no freedom to love.

Remembering the facts of death and Heaven gives us an even more pressing reason to learn to pray: We do not have an infinite amount of time. We are one day nearer Home today than we ever were before. I guarantee you that after you die you will not say 'I spent too much time praying; I wish I had watched more TV instead.'

Christ transforms the meaning and value of suffering from something to be feared or at best endured into something redemptive [and transformative].

Only God is to be loved for His own sake. Everything else is to be loved for God's sake.

Our judgements of good and evil ... presuppose God as the standard. If there's no God, there's neither good nor evil. There's just nature doing what it does

We need to have the mind of a conservative and the heart of a liberal.

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.

The big, blazing truth about man is that he has a heaven-sized hole in his heart, and nothing else can fill it. We pass our lives trying to fill the Grand Canyon with marbles. As Augustine said: Thou hast made us for Thyself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee.

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.

Sacraments are like hoses. They are the channels of the living water of God's grace. Our faith is like opening the faucet. We can open it a lot, a little, or not at all.

Anyone, without exception, can know God if they really want to simply by praying, by honestly telling Him that they want to know Him. He always responds to honest seekers. Jesus promised, 'All who seek, find.

The deepest healing is the healing of the deepest wound. The deepest wound is the frustration of the deepest need. The deepest need is the need for meaning, purpose, and hope.

Suffering is not blessed because it is suffering but because it is [Christ's]. Suffering is not the context that explains the cross; the cross is the context that explains suffering.

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.

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.

The six things in life that never get boring are knowing and loving God, your neighbor, and yourself.

Lack of prayer is the cause of lack of time.

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

Everything smaller than Heaven bores us because only Heaven is bigger than our hearts.

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

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.

God calls us, just as he called Abraham, away from the security we knew, out of our old, familiar, little room, down the ladder of faith and into his arms. Jesus called his disciples that way - just as a lover elopes with his beloved.

Gratitude is the seedbed of joy.

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

Great saints have often been made out of great sinners, but not one was ever made out of a wimp.

If God is not a Trinity, God is not love. For love requires three things: a lover, a beloved, and a relationship between them.

The closer we are to God, to divine attributes - such as absolute truth, goodness, and beauty - the more we wonder. When we separate ourselves from truth, goodness, and beauty, we lose wonder and become cynical. The Enlightenment was basically the narrowing of our vision to a purely scientific, empirical, rationalistic worldview, screwing down the manhole covers on us so we became squinting underground creatures.

The most total opposite of pleasure is not pain but boredom, for we are willing to risk pain to make a boring life interesting.

No one justifies lying, cheating, betraying, promise breaking, devastating and harming strangers. But we expect and we tolerate doing this to the one person in the world we promised most seriously to be faithful to forever: we justify divorce.

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.

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

How will the Tower of Babel be undone? How will we understand each other in Heaven? Will we all speak English or Dutch or Latin? No, we will speak music.

Being a Christian is more like having your soul possessed by a spirit than having your mind clothed with new beliefs... It is like being haunted by the Holy Ghost.

It was a very stupid mistake to think you could deal with heresy by burning heretics. It's the very same mistake that modernist Catholics are making today in reverse. They think you can love heretics by loving heresies.

I think nobody alive today is a more powerful agent of conversion than someone like Mother Teresa. You can refute arguments but not her life. When she came to the National Prayer Breakfast and lectured President Clinton about abortion, he had nothing to say to her. He can't argue with a saint. It's too bad there isn't an easier way, because becoming a saint is not the easiest thing in the world. It's much easier to become an apologist or a philosopher or a theologian.

When we pray, instead of trying to produce love in our souls toward God, we should be basking in God's love for us. How foolish to stay indoors in the cold, dark little room off the self, trying to turn on the light and turn up the heat, when we can just go outside into God's glorious Sonlight and receive his rays! How silly to fuss with artificial tanning salons and lotions and lights when the Son is out!

Our soul, like Mary's body, is to receive God Himself if only we, like her, believe, consent and receive; if only we speak her truly magic word fiat, "let it be." It is the creative word, the word God used to create the universe.

Why pray if we cannot change God? ...is that why we pray? To change omniscient Love? Isn't it rather to learn what it is and to fulfill it? Not to change it by our acts, but to change our acts by it.

Today, idols are not made of wood, stone, or brass. They are made of money, sex, and power.

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.

We do not do good works to get into heaven; we do good works because heaven has gotten to us.

If a person claims to have met Jesus without being changed then they have not met the real Jesus.

The only reason you are not yet a saint is because you do not wholly want to be one.

In every sin, we choose to believe the devil's lie rather than God's truth.

We can't avoid reasoning; we can only avoid doing it well.

Grey is the devil's favorite color.

If you didn't believe in objective truth, arguments would be just toys, or games, or jokes.

When you give yourself away you find that a new and more real self has somehow been given to you.

You see, God just will not let us flunk out of His school of love. He insists on remedial lessons until we get it right. For this whole world is a school set up by Love Himself to teach us to love.

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.

A saint isn't somebody who tries harder, but someone who trusts more.

We sinned for no reason but an incomprehensible lack of love, and He saved us for no reason but an incomprehensible excess of love.

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.

Faith is the root, the necessary beginning. Hope is the stem, the energy that makes the plant grow. Love is the fruit, the flower, the visible product, the bottom line. The plant of our new life in Christ is one; the life of God comes into us by faith, through us by hope, and out of us by the works of love.

Your heart is like an infinitely large hole, and only God is big enough to fill it.

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.