Peter Kreeft Quotes

Life is but thought.

Reductionism is a dirty word, and a kind of 'holistier than thou' self-righteousness has become fashionable.

Which came first, the mind or the idea of the mind? Have you never wondered? They arrived together. The mind is an idea.

The mind is a metaphor of the world of objects.

What we call a mind is nothing but a heap or collection of different perceptions, united together by certain relations and supposed, though falsely, to be endowed with a perfect simplicity and identity.

Time and space are just projections of your consciousness.

The world is emblematic. Parts of speech are metaphors, because the whole of nature is a metaphor of the human mind.

If someone smells a flower and says he does not understand, the reply to him is: there is nothing to understand, it is only a scent. If he persists, saying: that I know, but what does it all mean? Then one has either to change the subject, or make it more abstruse by saying that the scent is the shape which the universal joy takes in the flower.

Reductionism is merciless.

Each time your mind changes your whole world is changed.

Nothing has changed but my attitude, therefore, everything has changed.

You must look at facts, because they look at you.

This thou must always bear in mind, what is the nature of the whole.

Because he treats the world as rather empty and ignores the interrelatedness of all things (so stupefying to thought and action), administrative man can make decisions with relatively simple rules of thumb that do not make impossible demands upon his capacity for thought.

The unphilosophical and philosophical attitudes can be very sharply distinguished (with scarcely any intermediate forms) by the fact that the first accepts everything that happens as regards its general form, and finds occasion for surprise only in that special content by which something that happens here today differs from what happened there yesterday; whereas for the second, it is precisely the common features of all experience, such as characterise everything we encounter, which are the primary and most profound occasion for astonishment.

I love the world, because I love the mind that created the world.

Life in the true sense is perceiving or thinking.

The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk.

You make all the fashion statements just by dressing up your mind.

I often told the fanatics of realism that there is no such thing as realism in art: it only exists in the mind of the observer. Art is a symbol, a thing conjuring up reality in our mental image. That is why I don't see any contradiction between abstract and figurative art either.

A man is literally what he thinks, his character being the complete sum of all his thoughts.

How can we speak of the action of the mind under any divisions, as of its knowledge, of its ethics, of its works, and so forth, since it melts will into perception, knowledge into act? Each becomes the other. Itself alone is.

One of the most highly developed skills in contemporary Western civilization is dissection: the split -up of problems into their smallest possible components. We are good at it. So good, we often forget to put the pieces back together again.

Without consciousness there would, practically speaking, be no world, for the world exists as such only in so far as it is consciously reflected and considered by a psyche. Consciousness is a precondition of being.

I think everyone has the same question on their mind: Is the glass half-full or half-empty?