Peter Kreeft Quotes

In order to see Jesus, we first need to let him look at us!

Always pull back-and see how silly we must look to God.

To look away from the world, or to stare at it, does not help a man to reach God; but he who sees the world in Him stands in His presence.

An humble knowledge of thyself is a surer way to God than a deep search after learning.

The No. 1 thing you should know about me: I've always tried to put God first in my life, and I'm the first to admit I often have failed because I'm too proud and too stubborn.

The outer world, with all its phenomena, is filled with divine splendour, but we must have experienced the divine within ourselves, before we can discover it in our environment

O God and Father, I repent of my sinful preoccupation with visible things. The world has been too much with me. Thou hast been here and I knew it not. I have been blind to Thy Presence. Open my eyes that I may behold Thee in and around me. For Christ's sake, Amen.

Knowing God without knowing our own wretchedness makes for pride. Knowing our own wretchedness without knowing God makes for despair. Knowing Jesus Christ strikes the balance because he shows us both God and our own wretchedness.

My greatest desire is that I may perceive the God whom I find everywhere in the external world, in like manner also within and inside myself.

They that know God will be humble. They that know themselves cannot be proud.

You are not mature if you have a high esteem of yourself. He who boasts in himself is but a babe in Christ, if indeed he be in Christ at all. Young Christians may think much of themselves. Growing Christians think themselves nothing. Mature Christians know that they are less than nothing. The more holy we are, the more we mourn our infirmities, and the humbler is our estimate of ourselves.

Such excessive preoccupation with his faults is not a truly spiritual activity but, on the contrary, a highly egoistic one.The recognition of his own faults should make a man humbler, when it is beneficial, not prouder, which the thought that he ought to have been above these faults makes him.

Know thyself, and thou shalt know God.

The personal interiorization of the practice of humiliation is called humility.

In order to find God in ourselves, we must stop looking at ourselves, stop checking and verifying ourselves in the mirror of our own futility, and be content to be in Him and to do whatever He wills, according to our limitations, judging our acts not in the light of our own illusions, but in the light of His reality which is all around us in the things and people we live with.

The presence of any humility in my life is purely and completely an evidence of God's grace. From my perspective, I am not a humble man. I am a proud man pursuing humility by the grace of God.

Vanity is a mark of humility rather than of pride.

We seek for truth in ourselves; in our neighbours, and in its essential nature. We find it first in ourselves by severe self scrutiny, then in our neighbours by compassionate indulgence, and, finally, in its essential nature by that direct vision which belongs to the pure in heart.

Humiliation is the beginning of sanctification.

Aloneness is nearer God, nearer reality.

One of the values of centering prayer is that you are not thinking about God during the time of centering prayer so you are giving God a chance to manifest. In centering prayer there are moments of peace that give the psyche a chance to realize that God may not be so bad after all. God has a chance to be himself for a change.

The greatest enemy to human souls is the self-righteous spirit which makes men look to themselves for salvation.

It is true that I have been studying both humility and pride for many years for the purpose of weakening pride in my own life and cultivating humility by the grace of God.

You can either be a host to God, or a hostage to your ego. It's your call.

Judge yourself; if you do that you will not be judged by God, as St. Paul says. But it must be a real sense of your own sinfulness, not an artificial humility.