Quotes from Peter Kreeft

Despair itself can be hopeful if it is honest.

We must pray in order to grow, and we must grow because Infinite Love will not, cannot, settle for less than the greatest joy of which his beloved creature is capable.

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

Stand in the divine rain, and seeds of wisdom will grow in your soul.

There is something in us that fears prayer as a maggot fears light. We must do violence to this voice, for it is not ourselves. It is our Enemy.

From the premise that Christianity is true it follows that the far-off glimpse of joy produced by fantasy is a glimpse of truth; that a great eucatastrophic tale like The Lord of the Rings is a gift of divine grace, an opening of the curtain that veils Heaven to earthly eyes, a tiny telepathic contact with the Mind of God.

Go back to Socrates: Know thyself. For Socrates, there are only two kinds of people: the wise, who know they are fools; and fools, who think they are wise. Similarly, for Christ and all the prophets, there are only two kinds of people: saints, who know they are sinners; and sinners, who think they are saints. Which are you?

The person who is committing the sin of sloth may be doing nothing visible that is wrong. Yet he is rejecting the presence of God, refusing the joy of love.

The universal sin Saint Paul pinpoints in Romans 1:18 is to suppress the truth.

Three reasons God commands us to pray correlate to our three deepest needs, the fundamental needs of the three powers of our soul: prayer gives truth to our mind, goodness to our will, and beauty to our heart . 'The true, the good, and the beautiful' are the three things we need and love the most, because they are the three attributes of God.

That's what's so striking about the title of Kushner's book: When Bad Things Happen to Good People. How is that fair? Well, the answer to that is that there are no good people.

Only the wise know folly; fools know neither wisdom nor folly. Just as it takes wisdom to know folly, light to know darkness, it takes profundity to know vanity, meaning to know meaninglessness.

Haven't you forgotten the first and most important lesson in all of philosophy, the lesson taught to all of us by Socrates, the father of philosophy? That you are wise only when you are humble, that the very first bit of wisdom and the prerequisite for all others is the realization that we are not wise

What we do is not as important as what we are. Our functionalistic modern society tends to reduce our being to our function. What is the first question we ask about someone? "What does he do?" But love never asks that question first. The first question for love is always "Who are you?" rather than "What do you do?" Being is prior to doing, and love's realism refuses to reverse that real order.

Those who know, do not say; those who say, do not know.

I find my data first in myself, not first in the poets. For if I did not find it in myself, I would not be able to find it in the poets.

Love suffers far more for the pains of the beloved than for its own pains.

Your heart may be paltry compared with the heart of a great saint, but your heart is what God wants from you.

You do not have to wait until you become a saint. [Prayer] is the way to become a saint.

In fact, I strongly suspect that if we saw all the difference even the tiniest of our prayers to God make, and all the people those little prayers were destined to affect, and all the consequences of those effects down through the centuries, we would be so paralyzed with awe at the power of prayer that we would be unable to get up off our knees for the rest of our lives.

High and holy ambition--to be a saint--is not opposed to holy humility--total reliance on God's grace. Exactly the opposite. Ambition without humility is ambition that fails. It is pride, which goes before a fall (Prov 16:18). Humility without ambition is false humility.

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.

God makes it easy to begin: just do it! God also makes it easy to progress in prayer, for he rewards our efforts with peace and joy. And he makes it easiest of all at the end, for it gradually becomes more natural and delightful.

But that is all prayer requires: faith, hope, and love. Great holiness, or piety, or sanctity are not required. Prayer is a road to holiness.