Peter Kreeft
God allows unjust disparities between rich and poor because He does not miraculously intervene to establish justice against human wills. Also, discrepancies are not unjust by themselves; justice does not mean equality of result but equality of opportunity.Collection: Equality
Our culture has filled our heads but emptied our hearts, stuffed our wallets but starved our wonder. It has fed our thirst for facts but not for meaning or mystery. It produces "nice" people, not heroes.Collection: Nice
I strongly suspect that if we saw all the difference even the tiniest of our prayers make, and all the people those...prayers were destined to affect...we would be so paralyzed with awe...that we would be unable to get up off our knees for the rest of our lives.Collection: Prayer
Abortion is the Antichrist's demonic parody of the eucharist. That's why it uses the same holy words, "This is my body," with the blasphemous opposite meaning.Collection: Opposites
On my door is a cartoon of two turtles. One says, 'Sometimes I would like to ask why he allows poverty, famine and injustice when he could do something about it.' The other turtle says 'I am afraid that God might ask me the same question.'Collection: Turtles
The secret of joy is hidden in the word itself: first J, then O, then Y: Jesus first, Others next, Yourself last.Collection: Jesus
The national anthem of hell is, "I Did It My Way."Collection: Religion
If you love, you will suffer. The only way to protect yourself against suffering is to protect yourself against love - and that is the greatest suffering of all, loneliness.Collection: Faith
Our only qualitifcation for God's grace is our emptiness, not our fullness; our undeservingness, not our deservingness.Collection: Grace
We do not do good works to get into heaven; we do good works because heaven has gotten to us.Collection: Faith
Moral stupidity comes in two different forms: relativism and legalism. Relativism sees no principles, only people; legalism sees no people, only principles.Collection: Two
Control language and you control thought; control thought and you control action; control action and you control the world.Collection: World
We are all insane. That is what original sin means. Sin is insanity. It is preferring finite joy to infinite joy, creatures to the Creator, an unhappy, Godless self to a happy, God-filled self Only God can save us from this disease. That is what the name "Jesus" means: 'God saves'.Collection: Jesus
The deepest healing is the healing of the deepest wound. The deepest wound is the frustration of the deepest need. The deepest need is the need for meaning, purpose, and hope.Collection: Healing
Trying to fill the God-sized hole in our hearts with things other than God is like trying to fill the Grand Canyon with marbles.Collection: Heart
No culture in history has ever embraced moral relativism and survived. Our own culture, therefore, will either (1) be the first, and disprove history's clearest lesson, or (2) persist in its relativism and die, or (3) repent of its relativism and live. There is no other option.Collection: Culture
Original sin is the proclivity to say "my will be done" instead of "thy will be done."Collection: Done
Humility is not an exaggeratedly low opinion of yourself. Humility is self-forgetfulness.Collection: Humility
Nothing but prayer can make saints because nothing but God can make saints, and we meet God in prayer. Prayer is the hospital for souls where we meet Doctor God.Collection: Prayer
Listening to other people's needs is listening to God. Noticing simple, natural beauty, hearing music, even confronting the challenge of pain and problems - that can all be listening to God too.Collection: Pain
There are also two Christianities in the world today. There is (1) the Christianity of the New Testament, and there is (2) the Christianity of accommodation to modernism, egalitarianism, niceness, naturalism, pop psychology, secular humanism, relativism, subjectivism, individualism, "Enlightenment" rationalism or postmodern irrationalism. New converts to the first Christianity are constantly amazed and scandalized by finding many of their clergy to be in love with the second and in fear of the first.Collection: Egalitarianism
We can't avoid reasoning; we can only avoid doing it well.Collection: Wells
Actually, we have misdefined "hypocrisy." Hypocrisy is not the failure to practice what you preach but the failure to believe it. Hypocrisy is propaganda.Collection: Believe
We sinned for no reason but an incomprehensible lack of love, and He saved us for no reason but an incomprehensible excess of love.Collection: Jesus
In an age that has thrown off all tradition, the only rebellion possible is orthodoxy.Collection: Faith
Cats don't need to be possessed; they're evil on their own.Collection: Cat
Remembering the facts of death and Heaven gives us an even more pressing reason to learn to pray: We do not have an infinite amount of time. We are one day nearer Home today than we ever were before. I guarantee you that after you die you will not say 'I spent too much time praying; I wish I had watched more TV instead.'Collection: Home
God writes the story of our lives with the pen strokes of our own free choices.Collection: Writing
It is the modern feminists who are the real male chauvinists, lusting for reproductive freedom (sexual irresponsibility) like playboys and demanding empowerment, that is, envying and imitating not only males, but male fools, judging inner worth by outer performance, sacrificing being for doing, finding their identity in their worldly careers, not in their inner essence, in their physical and spiritual wombs and motherhoods. This is what Karl Stern called "the flight from woman."Collection: Spiritual
Why would the apostles lie?....Liars always lie for selfish reasons. If they lied, what was their motive, what did they get out of it? What they got out of it was misunderstanding, rejection, persecution, torture, and martyrdom. Hardly a list of perks!Collection: Life Changing
Don't be more serious than God. God invented dog farts.Collection: Dog
The best answer to the problem of evil is not one so much found on paper but on wood.Collection: Evil
If you want to get wet, go out to where it is raining; If you want to be a saint, find one and hang out with him.Collection: Rain
Money can buy everything money can buy, which is just a lot of stuff.Collection: Stuff
If your life is Christ, then your death will be only more of Christ, forever. If your life is only Christlessness, then your death will be only more Christlessness, forever. That's not fundamentalism, that's the law of non-contradiction.Collection: Jesus
Someone once said that if you sat a million monkeys at a million typewriters for a million years, one of them would eventually type out all of Hamlet by chance. But when we find the text of Hamlet, we don't wonder whether it came from chance and monkeys. Why then does the atheist use that incredibly improbable explanation for the universe? Clearly, because it is his only chance of remaining an atheist. At this point we need a psychological explanation of the atheist rather than a logical explanation of the universe.Collection: Atheist
The most compelling evidence for God's existence is Christ. If God does not exist, then Christ was the biggest fool who ever lived.Collection: Doe
Things look different when history is seen as His-story.Collection: Different
If the churches ever did reunite, it would have to be into something that was as sacramental and liturgical and authoritative as the Roman Catholic Church and as protesting against abuses and as much focused on the individual in his direct relationship with Christ as the Evangelicals, as charismatic as the Pentecostals, as missionary-minded as the old mainline denominations, as focused on holiness as the Methodists or the Quakers, as committed to the social aspects of the Gospel as the social activists, as Biblical as fundamentalists, and as mystical as the Eastern Orthodox.Collection: Biblical
I think nobody alive today is a more powerful agent of conversion than someone like Mother Teresa. You can refute arguments but not her life. When she came to the National Prayer Breakfast and lectured President Clinton about abortion, he had nothing to say to her. He can't argue with a saint. It's too bad there isn't an easier way, because becoming a saint is not the easiest thing in the world. It's much easier to become an apologist or a philosopher or a theologian.Collection: Mother
We need to have the mind of a conservative and the heart of a liberal.Collection: Heart
Pilate's skeptical sneer "What is truth?" was addressed to Truth Himself, standing there right in front of his face. The world's stupidest question was three words; God's profoundest answer was one Word.Collection: Three
The Church is God's Bride. All the saints and mystics say the ultimate purpose of human life, the highest end for which we were made, is the Spiritual Marriage. This is not socially relative; it is eternal. And in it, the soul is spiritually impregnated by God, not vice versa. That is the ultimate reason why God must always be he to us, never she. Religion is essentially heterosexual and therefore fruitful.Collection: God
God created the possibility of evil; people actualized that potentiality. The source of evil is not God's power but mankind's freedom. Even an all-powerful God could not have created a world in which people had genuine freedom and yet there was no potentiality for sin, because our freedom includes the possibility of sin within its own meaning.Collection: Powerful
The closer we are to God, to divine attributes - such as absolute truth, goodness, and beauty - the more we wonder. When we separate ourselves from truth, goodness, and beauty, we lose wonder and become cynical. The Enlightenment was basically the narrowing of our vision to a purely scientific, empirical, rationalistic worldview, screwing down the manhole covers on us so we became squinting underground creatures.Collection: Squinting
A saint isn't somebody who tries harder, but someone who trusts more.Collection: Trying
One of the few things in life that cannot possibly do harm in the end is the honest pursuit of the truth.Collection: Honesty
The most total opposite of pleasure is not pain but boredom, for we are willing to risk pain to make a boring life interesting.Collection: Pain
The church is: a conspiracy of love for a dying world, a spy mission into enemy occupied territory ruled by the powers of evil; a prophet from God with the greatest news the world has ever heard, the most life changing and most revolutionary institution that has existed on earth.Collection: Christian
The opposite of Christianity is not atheism, but idolatry.Collection: Opposites