Inspirational Quotes by Peter Kreeft

“Seek and you shall find” does not refer to anything else: long life, conquest of earthly enemies, freedom from pain, disease, death, betrayal, weakness, and so on. But it does refer to God and to that which God is: “God is agapē.” That is why all who seek it find it. De Caussade says: “If you search for this kingdom where God alone rules, you can be quite sure you will find it” (p. 112).”

“each one needs something outside itself to actualize its potentiality for change.”

“We must distinguish the act of faith from the object of faith, believing from what is believed.”

“Grace is not in nature so much as nature is in grace. Saint Thérèse said, on her deathbed, “Everything is grace.”

“Ancient ethics always dealt with three questions. Modern ethics usually deals with only one, or at the most two. The three questions are like the three things a fleet of ships is told by its sailing orders. (The metaphor is from C. S. Lewis.) First, the ships must know how to avoid bumping into each other. This is social ethics, and modern as well as ancient ethicists deal with it. Second, they must know how to stay shipshape and avoid sinking. This is individual ethics, virtues and vices, character building, and we hear very little about this from our modern ethical philosophers. Third, and most important of all, they must know why the fleet is at sea in the first place. What is their mission, their destination? This is the question of the summum bonum, and no modern philosophers except the existentialists seem even to be interested in this, the greatest of all questions. Perhaps that is why most modern philosophy seems so weak and wimpy, so specialized and elitist, and above all so boring, to ordinary people. I think I know why modern philosophers dare not raise this greatest of questions; because they have no answer to it. It is a hole so big that only the courage of an existentialist or the faith of a theist can fill it.”

“Love is supposed to bring us out of the dark prison of the “my will be done” ego into the joys of “thy will be done”, both horizontally and vertically, toward both the human and the divine Other.”

“Ancient ethics always dealt with three questions. Modern ethics usually deals with only one, or at the most two. The three questions are like the three things a fleet of ships is told by its sailing orders. (The metaphor is from C. S. Lewis.) First, the ships must know how to avoid bumping into each other. This is social ethics, and modern as well as ancient ethicists deal with it. Second, they must know how to stay shipshape and avoid sinking. This is individual ethics, virtues and vices, character building, and we hear very little about this from our modern ethical philosophers. Third, and most important of all, they must know why the fleet is at sea in the first place. What is their mission, their destination? This is the question of the summum bonum, and no modern philosophers except the existentialists seem even to be interested in this, the greatest of all questions. Perhaps that is why most modern philosophy seems so weak and wimpy, so specialized and elitist, and above all so boring, to ordinary people.”

“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).”

“The family that fights together stays together.”

“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.”

“Cicero famously said, you have no choice between having a philosophy and not having one, only between having a good one and having a bad one. And not to admit that you have a philosophy at all is to have a bad one. For it is one that does not know itself. So how could it know anything else, especially us?”

“In art, the world conforms to the creative idea; in science, the idea conforms to the world.”

“time you make a choice you are turning the central part of you, the part of you that chooses, into something a little different from what it was before. And taking your life as a whole, with all your innumerable choices, all your life long you are slowly turning this central thing either into a heavenly creature or into a hellish creature; either into a creature that is in harmony with God, and with other creatures, and with itself, or else into one that is in a state of war and hatred with God, and with its fellow-creatures, and with itself. To be the one kind of creature is heaven: that is, it is joy and peace and knowledge and power. To be the other means madness, horror, idiocy, rage, impotence, and eternal loneliness. Each of us at each moment is progressing to the one state or the other (Mere Christianity,”

“When you feel threatened by the Church, listen to the One who speaks from beneath those humble, human appearances: “It is I; be not afraid.”

“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.”

“As Francis Thompson wrote in his classic poem “The Hound of Heaven,” “Is my gloom, after all, shade of His hand outstretched caressingly?”

“He is not the solution to our problems; He is the giver of our problems. Our problems are His tasks and our opportunities, His teaching and our education, His will and our sanctification.”

“U svakom području života, tajna je originalnosti prestati pokušavati biti originalan i reći istinu onako kako je vidiš.”

“5. You can’t prove a lot of things that it would be lunacy to deny—for instance, that human reason is trustworthy, that it is not being hypnotized by a demon at every moment. Of course that thought is ridiculous, but can you prove it isn’t true? No, because you’d have to use your reason to prove it, and that means trusting the validity of reason, and that is assuming the very thing you’re supposed to be proving, “begging the question”. If a thousand prisoners are all on trial, no one of them has the right to be the judge and declare all one thousand innocent. If all acts of reasoning are on trial and need to be justified, no one of them has the right to do that justifying. So you can’t prove the validity of reasoning. So not everything has to be proved, for not everything can be proved. So the demand to prove the existence of spirit, and the refusal to believe it just because it isn’t proved, is an unfair demand.”

“Spirit means essentially two things: 1. The power of thinking—conscious, deliberate, rational understanding. Not sense perception; that’s the work of a bodily organ, like the eye. 2. The power of willing and choosing and deliberately loving. Not sensory appetite; that’s the work of a bodily function, like hunger.”