Quotes from Peter Kreeft

St. Thomas would have agreed with Leon Bloy, who often wrote that in the end there is only one tragedy in life: not to have been a saint.

God is love, and music is the language of love; therefore, music is the language of God. Music is a language more profound than words. How often have you heard a great piece of music and felt that? Great music does not just make you feel good; great music suggests some profound truth or mysterious meaning that is objectively true but not translatable into words.

Perhaps even atheism versus theism is an example of this principle that an apparent either/or can really be a both/and. For I suspect that the God you insist does not exist is probably a God I also insist does not exist; and perhaps the God I maintain does exist is a God you have never denied.

Why Won't We Be Bored in Heaven? Because we are with God, and God is infinite. We never come to the end of exploring Him. He is new every day. Because we are with God, and God is eternal. Time does not pass (a condition for boredom); it just is. All time is present in eternity, as all the events of the plot are present in an author's mind. There is no waiting. Because we are with God, and God is love. Even on earth, the only people who are never bored are lovers.

The more consciously and freely we choose an evil, the more responsible we are for it and the more guilty we are of it; this is why spiritual sins like pride are greater in guilt than carnal sins.

Mercy is Truth clothed; judgment is Truth naked.

Hell is not populated mainly by passionate rebels but by nice, bland, indifferent, respectable people who simply never gave a damn.

When you're in a burning building looking out of the twentieth story window down to the street and all you see is clouds of billowing smoke, you have to choose to believe the firemen below who tell you they have a safety net and it's safe to jump. When the clouds of smoke disappear, you don't have to believe any more: you see it. In this world, it's a leap in the dark; in the next world, it's a leap in the light.

There are only two persons you can never, ever escape, not for one moment, either in time or in eternity: God and yourself.

No one can be saved, and attain eternal joy, without all of the following: (1) a morally honest acceptance of the demands of virtue, (2) a serious effort to practice it, (3) an intellectually honest confession of failure, (4) repentance, and (5) at least an implicit faith and hope in God as Savior.

As society grows, it knows more and more about less and less. It knows more about the little things and less about the big things. It knows more about everything and less about Everything.

Only because a bird doesn't swim in the ocean but flies in the air can it enter the ocean from above; only because God is not temporal can he enter into time.

Only Judaism and Christianity are religions of public record, eyewitnessed facts.

One of the reasons lust is bad (not the only reason) is that it makes you stupid. Like any addiction, it blinds your vision to everything else and focuses it on the one thing that is the object of your addiction.

The practice of the presence of God, though we begin it at special times of prayer, is designed to spill out and over and into all times.

It is why God created matter, most of all the human body, which has the greatest power to make spirit visible. (Thus the philosopher Wittgenstein, asked what a human soul could possibly look like, answered, "Like a human body.")

when the soul no longer conforms to the will of God, the body no longer conforms to the will of the soul.

If I did not love you more today than I did yesterday, I would love you less, and that is intolerable. So I must find more ways to love you every day.

It's the most essential thing of all just because it's not a matter of how you do it at all, but of whether you do it. Like being born, or cooking: how you do it is less important than whether you do it. You can find thousands of books on prayer that give you methods of praying, hundreds of hows; but they do you no good at all unless you actually pray. Otherwise it's like reading a cookbook instead of cooking. You can't eat a cookbook!

We make a big deal out of Christmas; we should make an even bigger deal out of March 25. The greatest event in history, the Incarnation, happened at the Annunciation, not the Nativity.

that the ones who laugh the loudest and the most are usually the shallowest and the most foolish? And that the wisest are usually the gravest? Perhaps the wise are grave because they remember the grave.

If we seek the truth without realizing how far we are from it, we will be dogmatists. If we realize how far we are from the truth but do not seek it, we will be skeptics. If we both seek the truth and realize how far we are from it, we will be wise.

That freedom is lost in Hell.

The true philosopher lives his life as a dress rehearsal for death.