110+ Peter Kreeft Quotes On Education, Culture And God

Peter Kreeft is an American professor of philosophy at Boston College. He is a prolific author of Christian literature and has written over 60 books on topics such as philosophy, theology, and apologetics. He is a popular speaker at universities, churches, and conferences around the world. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Peter Kreeft on leadership, education, culture.

Top 10 Peter Kreeft Quotes

1. In an age that has thrown off all tradition, the only rebellion possible is orthodoxy.
2. If you love, you will suffer. The only way to protect yourself against suffering is to protect yourself against love - and that is the greatest suffering of all, loneliness.
3. Moral relativism has a reputation for being compassionate, caring and humane, but it is an extremely useful philosophy for tyrants.
4. The opposite of Christianity is not atheism, but idolatry.
5. Moral stupidity comes in two different forms: relativism and legalism. Relativism sees no principles, only people; legalism sees no people, only principles.
6. Don't be more serious than God. God invented dog farts.
7. Abortion is the Antichrist's demonic parody of the eucharist. That's why it uses the same holy words, "This is my body," with the blasphemous opposite meaning.
8. There is one and only one possible road to joy: selfless love.
9. 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.
10. If God is not a Trinity, God is not love. For love requires three things: a lover, a beloved, and a relationship between them.

Peter Kreeft Short Quotes

• The national anthem of hell is, "I Did It My Way."
• Everything smaller than Heaven bores us because only Heaven is bigger than our hearts.
• The opposite of theism is not atheism, it’s idolatry
• Grey is the devil's favorite color.
• Humility is not an exaggeratedly low opinion of yourself. Humility is self-forgetfulness.
• Be egalitarian regarding persons. Be elitist regarding ideas.
• Conscience is thus explained only as the voice of God in the soul.
• Reason alone cannot give you a whole steak, but it sure helps with identifying bologna.
• Great saints have often been made out of great sinners, but not one was ever made out of a wimp.
• In an age of relativism, orthodoxy is the only possible rebellion left

Peter Kreeft Quotes About God

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

The greatest Christians in history seem to say that their sufferings ended up bringing them the closest to God - so this is the best thing that could happen, not the worst. — Peter Kreeft

The womb is like an altar, it's the place where God continually comes into the world and does what only God can do...create. — Peter Kreeft

The church is: a conspiracy of love for a dying world, a spy mission into enemy occupied territory ruled by the powers of evil; a prophet from God with the greatest news the world has ever heard, the most life changing and most revolutionary institution that has existed on earth. — Peter Kreeft

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. — Peter Kreeft

Listening to other people's needs is listening to God. Noticing simple, natural beauty, hearing music, even confronting the challenge of pain and problems - that can all be listening to God too. — Peter Kreeft

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

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

God writes the story of our lives with the pen strokes of our own free choices. — Peter Kreeft

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

Peter Kreeft Quotes About Love

Only God may be adored, because only God is unlimited goodness, truth, and beauty, and thus only God deserves unlimited love. — Peter Kreeft

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

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. — Peter Kreeft

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

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. — Peter Kreeft

Thus moral theology leads us four steps deeper than law. To fulfill the moral law, we need love. To get love, we need union with God. To get union with God, we need the new birth. And to get the new birth, we need faith. — Peter Kreeft

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

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

The rich fop Francis of Assisi was bored all his life-until he fell in love with Christ and gave all his stuff away and became the troubadour of Lady Poverty. — Peter Kreeft

Feelings come to us, passively; love comes from us, actively, by our free choice. — Peter Kreeft

Peter Kreeft Quotes About Prayer

I strongly suspect that if we saw all the difference even the tiniest of our prayers make, and all the people those...prayers were destined to affect...we would be so paralyzed with awe...that we would be unable to get up off our knees for the rest of our lives. — Peter Kreeft

Lack of prayer is the cause of lack of time. — Peter Kreeft

Prayer is like Thanksgiving dinner. It takes one hour to eat it and ten hours to prepare it. — Peter Kreeft

Nothing but prayer can make saints because nothing but God can make saints, and we meet God in prayer. Prayer is the hospital for souls where we meet Doctor God. — Peter Kreeft

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

Peter Kreeft Quotes About Suffering

The solution to our suffering is our suffering! — Peter Kreeft

Kindness-mere kindness-cannot tolerate suffering. Love can. — Peter Kreeft

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. — Peter Kreeft

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

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. — Peter Kreeft

How you approach the problem of suffering depends on how you approach life itself. There are only two ways. Either meaning is surrounded by matter, or matter is surrounded by meaning. — Peter Kreeft

True love, unlike popular sentimental substitutes, is willing to suffer. Love is not "luv." Love is the cross. Our problem at first, the sheer problem of suffering, was a cross without Christ. We must never fall into the opposite and equal trap of a Christ without a cross. — Peter Kreeft

A God who did not abolish suffering-worse , a God who abolished sin precisely by suffering-is a scandal to the modern mind. — Peter Kreeft

Peter Kreeft Famous Quotes And Sayings

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

No culture in history has ever embraced moral relativism and survived. Our own culture, therefore, will either (1) be the first, and disprove history's clearest lesson, or (2) persist in its relativism and die, or (3) repent of its relativism and live. There is no other option. — Peter Kreeft

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.' — Peter Kreeft

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. — Peter Kreeft

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

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. — Peter Kreeft

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

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. — Peter Kreeft

God allows unjust disparities between rich and poor because He does not miraculously intervene to establish justice against human wills. Also, discrepancies are not unjust by themselves; justice does not mean equality of result but equality of opportunity. — Peter Kreeft

Story is the oldest, commonest, most beloved, and most effective form of communication because our life is essentially a story. That's why the Bible is the most realistic of religious books. We can easily ignore or argue away abstractions, but we bump up against concretely real people, things, and events in story, as in life. — Peter Kreeft

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

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. — Peter Kreeft

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. — Peter Kreeft

Trying to fill the God-sized hole in our hearts with things other than God is like trying to fill the Grand Canyon with marbles. — Peter Kreeft

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

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

It is mercy, not justice or courage or even heroism, that alone can defeat evil. — Peter Kreeft

Why would the apostles lie?....Liars always lie for selfish reasons. If they lied, what was their motive, what did they get out of it? What they got out of it was misunderstanding, rejection, persecution, torture, and martyrdom. Hardly a list of perks! — 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

Faith is not like bottled water but like rain. Its destiny is not just to be kept and held but to make something visible grow. — Peter Kreeft

Violence is spiritual junk food, and boredom is spiritual anorexia. — Peter Kreeft

Our destiny is to be so intimately united with God that, as the mystics say, we not only see God's face but also see with God's face. — Peter Kreeft

God created the possibility of evil; people actualized that potentiality. The source of evil is not God's power but mankind's freedom. Even an all-powerful God could not have created a world in which people had genuine freedom and yet there was no potentiality for sin, because our freedom includes the possibility of sin within its own meaning. — Peter Kreeft

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 — Peter Kreeft

It is closer to the truth to say that God is crazy than that God is reasonable. I suspect God merely smiles when someone calls him crazy, but shakes His head and frowns when someone calls Him reasonable. — Peter Kreeft

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. — Peter Kreeft

There are relatively few atheists among neurologists and brain surgeons and astrophysicists, but many among psychologists, sociologists, and historians. The reason seems obvious: the first study divine design, the second study human undesign. — Peter Kreeft

God gives us not only the truth but also the ability to believe it; not only the new thing to see but also the new eye to see it with. — Peter Kreeft

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). — Peter Kreeft

Every blade of grass is a blade of grace, a grace note in God's single Song. Nature is not blind and dumb. Nature is eloquent. Human science is blind and dumb if it does not hear this eloquence. — Peter Kreeft

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

If we had absolute proof instead of clues, then you could no more deny God than you could deny the sun. If we had no evidence at all, you could never get there. God gives us just enough evidence so that those who want him can have him. — Peter Kreeft

Actually, we have misdefined "hypocrisy." Hypocrisy is not the failure to practice what you preach but the failure to believe it. Hypocrisy is propaganda. — Peter Kreeft

Sin has made us stupid, so that we can only learn the hard way. — Peter Kreeft

Peace is a mark of the Holy Spirit. — Peter Kreeft

Mary's light is like that of the moon, totally reflected from the sun, the Son of God. — Peter Kreeft

Even David Hume, one of history most famous skeptics, said it's just barely possible that God exists. — Peter Kreeft

Science only answers the question, How does it work? Or at most, What's there? Science asks what and how, philosophy asks why, myth and religion ask who. Who's in charge here? Who's the author? That's what we really long to know. — Peter Kreeft

Diversion and indifference are the two widest roads to Hell in today's world. — Peter Kreeft

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

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. — Peter Kreeft

Prayer is essentially the practice of the presence of God, and that is the road to Heaven. There is no alternative. God is the only game in town. All other roads are dead ends. Since we must give our all to the one true God, we must not give any part to idols, to the many false gods that now bite away at our lives. — Peter Kreeft

The field of earth and of our human nature is now no longer barren but full of the seed of divine life. But it takes time for the seed to grow, for the Kingdom to come, and we are commanded to pray and work for that coming, that growth, even if we do not yet see the fruits, or even the blossoms, or even the leaves... — Peter Kreeft

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

Scripture starts with the particular and then universalizes it. You are called to love your concrete individual neighbor and then to realize that every individual is your neighbor. The point is not to destroy concrete neighborhood in a fit of universalism but to expand the local neighborhood and embrace the universal neighborhood. — Peter Kreeft

The key to faith is love. We believe only if we love. Trust is the middle term; only if we love, do we trust; and only if we trust, do we believe. — Peter Kreeft

Objective truth itself is sometimes often seen as a right wing Republican-Christian plot to take over the government (though the rhetoric is cleverer than that, that's the bottom line). — Peter Kreeft

Forgiveness is the reason for the crucifixion, and the crucifixion is the reason for the Incarnation. — Peter Kreeft

Love is faith's flower, hope is its stem. Grace comes into us by faith, like water through the roots of a tree. It rises in us by hope, like sap rising through the trunk of a tree. And it matures in us by [love] as fruit matures on a tree's branches, fruit for the neighbor's eating. — Peter Kreeft

Christianity is God's marriage proposal to the soul. — Peter Kreeft

If we turn to the divine Conductor and follow the wise and loving baton that is His will, His Word, then the music of our life will be a symphony. — Peter Kreeft

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

The best answer to the problem of evil is not one so much found on paper but on wood. — Peter Kreeft

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. — Peter Kreeft

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

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

Most theists are deists most of the time, in practice if not in theory. They practice the absence of God instead of the presence of God. — Peter Kreeft

Bad times make good people, as mountainous pressures make diamonds or as fire tempers steel. — Peter Kreeft

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. — Peter Kreeft

The block of marble is not the sculptor, and doesn't see that he's about to become a masterpiece... We're the block of marble and God is the sculptor, and the chisel is.... everything. — Peter Kreeft

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. — Peter Kreeft

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. — Peter Kreeft

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

To worship a crocodile is better to worship yourself. — Peter Kreeft

If you want to get wet, go out to where it is raining; If you want to be a saint, find one and hang out with him. — Peter Kreeft

Atheists in C.S. Lewis' day were as snobbish and arrogant as they are now, but better educated and more capable of debate. — Peter Kreeft

When a maniac is at the door, feuding brothers reconcile. — Peter Kreeft

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

Life Lessons by Peter Kreeft

1. Peter Kreeft's work emphasizes the importance of understanding the complexities of faith and reason in order to fully appreciate the beauty of both.
2. He encourages readers to think deeply and critically about the world around them, and to strive for a deeper understanding of the spiritual and philosophical aspects of life.
3. He also encourages readers to be open to the idea of faith and to explore the ways in which faith and reason can be reconciled.