Quotes from Peter Kreeft

Principles without facts are empty, but facts without principles are blind.

We want to complexify our lives. We don't have to, we want to. We want to be harried and hassled and busy. Unconsciously, we want the very thing we complain about. For if we had leisure, we would look at ourselves and listen to our hearts and see the great gaping hole in our hearts and be terrified, because that hole is so big that nothing but God can fill it.

Even though we hate some of the things we do or feel, we hate them only because we love ourselves. We feel we are unworthy of such bad stuff.

It hardly ever attaches to any other sin except one, and is never heard from any organized group of people except one.

We cannot hate truth in general, all truth, as we cannot hate food in general, all food. But we can hate a particular truth even though it is good for us, as we can hate a particular food even though it is good for us:

Like the Fellowship itself, Tolkien's philosophy fights. It conquers what George Orwell called the "smelly little orthodoxies" of political correctness that have twisted and wounded our souls. In other words, it is like the healing herb athelas (see LOTR, p. 193).

of all the natural virtues these four are "cardinal," i.e., the hinges ("cardes") on which all other virtues turn, the foundations on which all the other virtues are built.

It is faith (trust) that affirms that the light, the ultimate truth, is perfect love. (That's because there is only one God, and He is both.) Therefore faith is the key to this absolute love of truth.

murder and adultery are great crimes.

But a sneer can be a greater crime than a murder subjectively, for a sneer means "You are beneath contempt, you are sub-human, you are worthless scum, you are not even worth taking the trouble and time to kill", while a murder may mean "You are important and formidable and you are my enemy, and thus I must kill you." That can be a compliment, compared to a sneer.

Ai xu?ng h?a ng?c ??u có th? hát lên: Tôi Ä'ã s?ng theo ý tôi.

Presumption and despair are opposite deadly sins. We hear a lot about despair, and the need for hope; but what is presumption?

For he believed not only that there was all truth somewhere but also that there was some truth everywhere.

Kamo god da ideš, s tobom ide i tvoj an?eo ?uvar. Prije nego što se spremaš nekamo i?i, razmisli je li to mjesto prikladno za jednoga an?ela.

There is little passion for anything except pleasure and comfort and security. Indeed, passion is confused with fanaticism.

Angels are made of pure spirit (mind and will) without matter, without bodies. Therefore they must communicate by mental telepathy.

a God without wrath saves a man without sin by mercy without judgment for a Heaven without a Hell through a Christ without a cross.

Heidegger says that "the fundamental question of metaphysics" is "why is there anything at all rather than nothing?" The fundamental question is not, as Plato thought, "what" a thing is (every Platonic dialogue is about that, about an essence, a definition, a concept, such as justice or piety or learning) but why it exists, why anything exists. Plato never asked that ultimate question. And the answer is God.

If the unhappiness of the wicked angels comes at length to an end, the happiness of the good will also come to an end, which is inadmissible.

he rewards our efforts with peace and joy.

Angels just see it all at once; they see all the individual applications of the general principle in the general principle

that habituation is a slow, imperceptible sinking, whose point of no return is not clearly marked.

The cathedrals were not financed by taxes, on the poor or on the rich. They were financed by gifts, from rich and poor alike. They were not built at the expense of the poor; they were built by the poor, by the peasants who worked on them, and by their gifts. And the cathedrals were also built for the poor, who usually love them more than the rich do. (The rich build banks; the poor build cathedrals. We build what we love.)

Even if it were within her legal right and authority, it would harm more than help. It might be argued that it is like capital punishment today: the state has the right to use it if necessary, but since it is no longer necessary, it would do more public harm than good in the current war against the culture of death.