The collection / 84 fragments

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Passages, proverbs, and questions carried across the ages.

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01c. 1937 AD

Don't be more serious than God. God invented dog farts. God designed your body's plumbing system. God designed an ostrich. If He didn't do it, He permitted a drunken angel to do it. Empirical facts can add significantly to the meaning of "being godlike".

Peter Kreeft / quote

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02c. 1937 AD

If you place [your bet] with God, you lose nothing, even if it turns out that God does not exist. But if you place it against God, and you are wrong and God does exist, you lose everything.

Peter Kreeft / quote

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03c. 1937 AD

Protestants believe that the sacraments are like ladders that God gave to us by which we can climb up to Him. Catholics believe that they are like ladders that God gave to Himself by which He climbs down to us.

Peter Kreeft / quote

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04c. 1937 AD

Conscience is thus explained only as the voice of God in the soul.

Peter Kreeft / quote

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05c. 1937 AD

The saints, too, had wandering minds. The saints, too, had constantly to recall their constantly wandering mind-child home. They became saints because they continued to go after the little wanderer, like the Good Shepherd.

Peter Kreeft / quote

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06c. 1937 AD

We try too much and trust too little. Count the times God's Book tells us to "try." Now count the times it tells us to "trust.

Peter Kreeft / quote

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07c. 1937 AD

God really performs the miracle of multiplying our time, but only if we give it to him first.

Peter Kreeft / quote

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08c. 1937 AD

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.

Peter Kreeft / quote

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09c. 1937 AD

The only way God can strengthen his presence in our will is to weaken his presence in our feelings. Otherwise we would become spiritual cripples, unable to walk without emotional crutches. This is why he gives us dryness, sufferings, and failures.

Peter Kreeft / quote

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10c. 1937 AD

If we rely on anything else besides faith to maintain the practice of the presence of God, we will certainly fail, whether this is our feelings, or experiences, or sincerity, or good intentions, or reasonings, or plans. The reason these things will fail while faith will not fail is that all these things depend on us, while faith depends on God. It is a gift of God.

Peter Kreeft / quote

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11c. 1937 AD

In an age of hope men looked up at the night sky and saw “the heavens." In an age of hopelessness they call it simply “space.

Peter Kreeft / quote

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12c. 1937 AD

Trusting God's grace means trusting God's love for us rather than our love for God. […] Therefore our prayers should consist mainly of rousing our awareness of God's love for us rather than trying to rouse God's awareness of our love for him, like the priests of Baal on Mount Carmel (1 Kings 18:26-29).

Peter Kreeft / quote

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13c. 1937 AD

Argumentation is a human enterprise that is embedded in a larger social and psychological context. This context includes (1) the total psyches of the two persons engaged in dialogue, (2) the relationship between the two persons, (3) the immediate situation in which they find themselves and (4) the larger social, cultural and historical situation surrounding them.

Peter Kreeft / quote

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14c. 1937 AD

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.

Peter Kreeft / quote

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15c. 1937 AD

America does not know the difference between money and sex. It treats sex like money because it treats sex as a medium of exchange, and it treats money like sex because it expects its money to get pregnant and reproduce.

Peter Kreeft / quote

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16c. 1937 AD

It is true, as John Bunyan said, that God infinitely prefers a heart without words to words without a heart when we pray.

Peter Kreeft / quote

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17c. 1937 AD

Music is more powerful than reason in the soul. That is also why Plato made music the very first step in his long educational curriculum: good music was to create the harmony of soul that would be a ripe field for the higher harmony of reason to take root in later. And that is also why he said that the decay of the ideal state would begin with a decay in music. In fact, one of your obscure modern scholars has shown that social and political revolutions have usually been preceded by musical revolutions, and why another sage said, 'Let me write the songs of a nation and I care not who writes its laws.

Peter Kreeft / quote

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18c. 1937 AD

What our Heavenly Father wants us to do about our spiritual failures is like what our earthly father wants us to do about our earthly failures. When we fall off the horse, or the bike, or the high road to Heaven, we must simply climb on again as soon as we are aware of the fact that we have fallen off, rather than sitting there stewing in self-pity or self-hatred.

Peter Kreeft / quote

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19c. 1937 AD

We are not free to love God insofar as we are enslaved to creatures. And we all are. We are addicted to whatever we cannot part with that is less than God, our true good. And that includes ourselves--especially ourselves and our own will. So we must renounce this too, this especially. God's world is not the problem; our attitude is. God does not want us to renounce the unspeakably beautiful world he gave us as creation, as gift, as it really is. He wants us to renounce it as creator, as our god, as it really is not. This wonderful world is our God-given house to live in and to live the love of God in. But God's bride must learn not to love her house as if it were her husband.

Peter Kreeft / quote

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20c. 1937 AD

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). These are the tow reasons we hid from other people, even our friends, even our parents, and the tow reasons we should never hide from God.

Peter Kreeft / quote

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21c. 1937 AD

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.

Peter Kreeft / quote

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22c. 1937 AD

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.

Peter Kreeft / quote

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23c. 1937 AD

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

Peter Kreeft / quote

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24c. 1937 AD

To invoke Jesus' name is to place yourself in his presence, to open yourself to his power, his energy. The prayer of Jesus' name actually brings God closer, making him more present. He is always present in some way, since he knows and loves each one of us at every moment; but he is not present to those who do not pray as intimately as he is present to those who do. Prayers a difference; 'prayer changes things.' It may or may not change our external circumstances. (It does if God sees that that change is good for us; it does not if God sees that it is not.) but it always changes our relationship to God, which is infinitely more important than external circumstances, however pressing they may seem, because it is eternal but they are temporary, and because it is our very self but they are not.

Peter Kreeft / quote

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