Top 263 Quotes & Sayings by Peter Kreeft - Page 4

Of course the more you love the sinner the more you hate and make war on the sin, just as the more you love the person, the more you hate and kill the cancer cells that are killing the person. Compassion for cancer cells does not come from compassion for persons; it comes precisely from lack of compassion for persons.

God's love is as objective as light. Because the sun in a sense is light, or the source of light rather than being lit, it really gives its light to the earth. And because the earth really receives light from the sun, it is really transformed every morning from darkness to light. Just as objectively, because God is love, God really gives love to us. And because we receive real life-changing love from God, we are really transformed from darkness to light.

A pure heart means a single heart, a heart in which only one desire lives: love.

To those of you who would classify yourselves as conservatives I would say, meditate long and hard on Jesus' saying "Whatever you do to the least of these you have done to me".

We are artists, because God is.

In an age of relativism, orthodoxy is the only possible rebellion left

Indifference is the only road that never gets to God.

A saint is Christ's bride, totally attached, faithful, dependent. A saint is also totally independent, detached from idols and from other husbands... A saint is higher than anyone else in the world. A saint is the real mountain climber. A saint is also lower than anyone else in the world. As with water, he flows to the lowest places - like Calcutta.

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

Adoration will heal our Church and thus our nation and thus our world... Adoration touches everyone and everything... [because it touches the Creator, Who touches everything and everyone]... When we adore, we plug into infinite dynamism and power. Adoration is more powerful for construction than nuclear bombs are for destruction

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

Things look different when history is seen as His-story.

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.

The Church is God's Bride. All the saints and mystics say the ultimate purpose of human life, the highest end for which we were made, is the Spiritual Marriage. This is not socially relative; it is eternal. And in it, the soul is spiritually impregnated by God, not vice versa. That is the ultimate reason why God must always be he to us, never she. Religion is essentially heterosexual and therefore fruitful.

Agape's object is always the concrete individual, not some abstraction called humanity. Love of humanity is easy because humanity does not surprise you with inconvenient demands. You never find humanity on your doorstep, stinking and begging.

Love is the binding force on every level of existence.

If you truly love God and His will, then doing what you will, will, in fact, be doing what God wills.

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.

Every gift requires two freedoms: the giver's and the receiver's.

For the wise men of old, the cardinal problem of human life was how to conform the soul to objective reality, and the solution was wisdom, self-discipline, and virtue. For the modern, the cardinal problem is how to conform reality to the wishes of man, and the solution is a technique.

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.

It is reasonable to love the Absolute absolutely for the same reason it is reasonable to love the relative relatively.

If there is a God, there is a map. If God has a map, his map is the true map.

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

God is a person [in Christ]. A person can be known only by personal understanding, not impersonal understanding. Personal understanding takes place through love, caring, willingness, intimacy, and relationship.

Like white light refracted through a prism and split into many colors, God's eternal love-nature, expressed through the prism of time, becomes God's multicolored love story. History is His story.

Life is always fatal. No one gets out of it alive

Prayer is fundamentally a transformation of will, a lifting of the heart and will to God.

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

The Inquisition confused sin with sinners and judged both. Modern Americans make the same mistake but judge neither.

The self is like a baseball. Throw it back to the divine pitcher who pitched it to you in the first place, and the game of love goes on. Hold it, and the game is over. That is the difference between Heaven and Hell.

God continuously comes into the world in two places - at the altar and in the womb.

God is not pre or post anything. He is present to everything. ... There is not predestination but destination, not predestiny but destiny. This follows from divine omniscience and eternity.

Agape is the catalyst that makes value appear in anything.

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

Violence is spiritual junk food, and boredom is spiritual anorexia.

Since we are [Christ's] body, we too are the bread that is broken for others. Our failures help heal other lives; our very tears help wipe away tears; our being hated helps those we love.

Philosophy has degenerated into ideology.

Forgiveness is the reason for the crucifixion, and the crucifixion is the reason for the Incarnation.

The civilization you sit in ... is now obvious in crisis, perhaps death pangs, twisting grotesquely like a dying animal, swirling down the garbage drain-this civilization was founded on God's road map.

Now I see that God prefers to work through intermediaries - Mary and the saints. . . He wants us to pray through Mary and not only directly.

To worship a crocodile is better to worship yourself.

No emotion, merely as an emotion, is a sin, because we cannot directly control the arising of an emotion in our soul.

A woman has a responsibility and a privilege that a man doesnt have of given birth to another human being.

Humility is the marriage bond of Heaven. Pride is the frigidity of Hell.

Peace is a mark of the Holy Spirit.

Money can buy everything money can buy, which is just a lot of stuff.

Abortion is the insurance against that fate worse than death which is called a family. Our no-fault insurance has removed our responsibility for car accidents, and no-fault divorce has removed our responsibility for marriage accidents; why should abortion not be our no-fault sexual insurance policy that removes our responsibility for sex accidents?

Thanksgiving comes after Christmas.

Subtract miracles from Islam, Buddhism, Confucianism, or Toaism, and you have essentially the same religion left. Subtract miracles from Christianity, and you have nothing but the cliches and platitudes most American Christians get weekly (and weakly) from their pulpits.

Intellectuals resist faith longer because they can: where ordinary people are helpless before the light, intellectuals are clever enough to spin webs of darkness around their minds and hide in them. That's why only Ph.D.s believe any of the 100 most absurd ideas in the world such as Absolute Relativism, or the Objective Truth of Subjectivism, of the Meaningfulness of Meaninglessness and the Meaninglessness of Meaning, which is the best definition of Deconstructionism I know.

Ethics without virtue is an illusion. What is the highest purpose of ethics? It is to make a person good, that is virtuous.

It is easier to compare concrete things in a fictional story with concrete things in real life than it is to compare abstractions with concrete things in real life (though both are honorable and necessary things to do).

Reason alone cannot give you a whole steak, but it sure helps with identifying bologna.

The solution to our suffering is our suffering!

To many moderns, [love] is something that is only a part of us rather than something of which we are a part.

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

It is said that there are three sources of evil, "the world, the flesh, and the Devil"; but the world and the flesh would be innocent were it not for the Devil.

Americans' deepest religion is often equality. The notion that Christ alone is God-superior, authoritative, supernatural-and that Christ's teaching and person is far greater than Buddha's, or Muhammad's, or Moses's, no matter how much great and good wisdom may be contained in those others, is scandalous.

Envy, though not the greatest sin, is the only one that gives the sinner no pleasure at all, not even fake and temporary satisfaction.