Inspirational Quotes by Peter Kreeft

“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.”

“God’s solution to the problem of evil is his Son Jesus Christ. The Father’s love sent his Son to die for us to defeat the power of evil in human nature: that’s the heart of the Christian story.”

“Becoming saints is the meaning of life. It is why we exist. It is why God created us.”

“Delight is a subjective reason for praying, but it is a valid one.”

“For even though our prayer-contact with God may be almost infinitely poor, the God we thus contact is infinitely rich!”

“Learning to pray is dress rehearsal for eternal life.”

“We cannot go from our darkness to his light, because we are working in the dark. But God can go from his light to our darkness, because he is working in the light.”

“Dostoyevsky says, “love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared to love in dreams” (The Brothers Karamazov).”

“First, you must read it, not as you read other books, but slowly and thoughtfully (that is why I made it very short) and above all prayerfully, that is, under the eye of God, in the presence of Truth and therefore in absolute honesty. Second, you must actually do it, not just read about doing it, think about doing it, understand how to do it, plan to do it, or imagine yourself doing it. It is a cookbook, not a dinner.”

“We pray to obey God, not to “play God”. We pray, not to change God’s mind, but to change our own; not to command God, but to let God command us. We pray to “let God be God”. Prayer is our obedience to God even when it asks God for things, for God has commanded us to ask (Mt 7:7).”

“We pray, not simply as some solitary self-improvement program, but because we have been addressed by God. Prayer is a response to a prior divine invitation.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Our conversation with God should be utterly free and familiar, because God is the only person who will never, ever misunderstand us and never, ever reject us (hate us, ignore us, or be indifferent to us).”

“No story is more beautiful than the Gospel, even though it is a story full of pain and nails and hate and blood and sin and murder and betrayal and forsakenness and unimaginable agony and death. It is the story of what happens to the most beautiful thing, Perfect Love, when it enters our world: it comes to a Cross, to the crossroad between good and evil. All our most beautiful stories are like the Gospel: they are tragedies first, and then comedies; they are crosses and then crowns. They are crosses because they are conflicts between good and evil. That is the fundamental plot of every great story. To say "that story is beautiful" means "that story resembles the Gospel." If you are bored by the Gospel, that puts no black eye on the Gospel, but on you. Most likely, it means you have never listened to it. You must have heard it, but hearing is far from the same thing as listening...”

“St. Thomas is as practical and plain and reasonable in ethics as Aristotle, or Confucius, or your uncle.”

“Love makes more waves than hate. Wicked men will hate and fear you more for loving them than for hating them. They will quickly forgive you for being wrong, but they will never forgive you for being right. Saints always go into the ghettos, especially the moral ghettos. They make waves. Moses made waves. Jesus made waves. Muhammad made waves. The waves make the garbage come to the surface, and the waves of garbage often drown the saints and make them martyrs, white corpuscles that give themselves up to fight an infection. Saints are society's white corpuscles, society's saviors. If nobody wants to crucify you, you're not doing your job. Or else your job isn't his work.”

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

“Most of us know that our heart is our center, not our head. But apologetics gets at the heart through the head. The head is important precisely because it is a gate to the heart. We can love only what we know.”

“Every human soul craves "the good, the true, and the beautiful" absolutely and without limit. And it is precisely about these three most fundamental values that the gap is the widest. Ordinary people still believe in a real morality, a real difference between good and evil; and in objective truth and the possibility of knowing it; and in the superiority of beauty over ugliness. But our educators, or "experts" (Fr. Richard John Neuhaus calls them "the chattering classes"), feel toward these three traditional values the way people think medieval inquisitors felt toward witches. Our artists deliberately prefer ugliness to beauty, our moralists fear goodness more than evil, and our philosophers embrace various forms of post-modernism that reduce truth to ideology or power.”