Peter Kreeft Quotes

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.

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

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.

Atheism cheapens everything it touches - look at the results of communism, the most powerful form of atheism on earth.

Lack of prayer is the cause of lack of time.

Christ is the Word of God in person. The Bible is the Word of God in writing. Both are the Word of God in the words of men. Both have a human nature and a divine nature.

Agape is the catalyst that makes value appear in anything.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

We can and should investigate and learn from the wisdom in other religions.

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.

It is the Godfather, not God the Father, who makes you an offer you can’t refuse.

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

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

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.

If you are truly confident about something, you welcome honest questions about it.

Joy is not a feeling in us. Joy does not enter into us. We enter into joy: "Enter into the joy of your Lord" (Mt 25:21).

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

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.

Peace is a mark of the Holy Spirit.

Other religions are stories of man's search for God. The Bible is the story of God's search for man.

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.

Put the Protestant flint and the Catholic steel together, and you will kindle a fire that will burn all around the world.

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

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.

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

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

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).

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

We are artists, because God is.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Our only qualitifcation for God's grace is our emptiness, not our fullness; our undeservingness, not our deservingness.

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

Saints have to be tough as well as tender because saints are like Christ, and Christ was the toughest and the tenderest man who ever lived.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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."

Christianity is God's marriage proposal to the soul.