Quotes from Peter Kreeft

A classic is like a cow: it gives fresh milk every morning. A classic is a book that rewards endlessly repeated reading. A classic is like the morning, like nature herself: ever young, ever renewing. No, not even like nature, for she, like us, is doomed to die. Only God is ever young, and only the Book he inspired never grows old.

It is significant that in most languages there is a single word for the essential virtue regarding both of these two relationships, which are the only two relationships where we cannot pay all that is owed. The word is "piety" (pietas). It means honor to both ancestors and God, the authors of our life.

St. Thomas connects servile fear with dead faith (loveless faith) and filial fear with living faith.

To a humble mind nothing is more astonishing than to hear its own excellence.

If humility were not self-forgetfulness, any virtuous person would have the practical dilemma of either directing his attention to his own virtue, which naturally leads to pride, or denying it, which would be a lie.

Belief in angels makes an even bigger difference if you believe in God and pray, because your prayers to God to send angel help will be answered.

To undo a contradiction, make a distinction.

Those who love Tolkien are almost always good people, honest people. Some are Hobbit-like and some are Elvish, but none are Orcish. Not all Tolkien haters are Orcs, but all Orcs are Tolkien haters.

God is infinite bodiless spirit, your soul is finite embodied spirit, and angels are finite bodiless spirits.

Socrates: So was I. Bertha: Are you saying you're as great as him, then? Socrates: No, no, on the contrary, I'm assuming just the opposite!

the God of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—is moral today.

Some philosophers

to dispense from the laws.

It's the same world as ours but also a different world because no two people see it in exactly the same way.

Pascal would not have needed to read this book. He wrote: "Not only do we only know God through Jesus Christ, but we only know ourselves through Jesus Christ; we only know life and death through Jesus Christ. Apart from Jesus Christ we cannot know the meaning of our life, or our death, of God or of ourselves.

It's out of liberal-hearted love and compassion for people that the Church has always been so hardheadedly conservative about doctrine.

Though He slay me, yet will I trust Him" (Job 13:15).

the mere necessity brings with it a dispensation, since necessity knows no law. . . .

They are our bodyguards and soulguards. But not as servants or pets. If anything, we are like pets to them.

The Exodus also = salvation; Egypt = sin; Pharoah = Satan; Moses = Christ; the Jews = the Church; the Red Sea = death; the wilderness = Purgatory; the Old Law = the New Law; the gospel; the old Mount (Sinai) = the new mount from which Jesus preached His "sermon on the mount" (Mt 5-7); and the Promised Land = Heaven. The "=" is not mathematical but symbolic.

essential form

The claims the Catholic Church makes are a little like the claims Christ makes: so superhuman that it becomes impossible to take a comfortable, middle-of-the-road attitude toward them, unless we are either sleeping or dishonest. The man who claimed to be God is either God or a lunatic and blasphemer. And the Church that claims to be the body of the God-man, with divine authority to teach infallibly, to forgive sins, to make Christ

sacramentally present at Mass—this Church is either God 's own or it is the devil's own.

Morality flows from metaphysics because goodness flows from God.