Food for the Soul Quotes

“He asked Adam, “Where are you?” He did not mean “I can’t see you.” God sees everything. What did he mean? He meant “Now that you have removed yourself from my presence, now that you have left the relationship of faith and trust and obedience, now that you have declared your independence from me and left your home and your innocence and the garden where everything was a joy for you and where you knew where you were because I was your center—now that all that is gone, where are you? You were my planet, staying in orbit around me as your sun. Now you have left my solar system, and you are out in the darkness and coldness and emptiness of outer space; you have lost your absolute point of reference, so you no longer know where you are. You are homeless, because I am your true home, and you have left me. You are lost. There is no other hope for you, no other sun, no other God. I am not one God among many; I am the one and only one. You have lost the one source of all light and truth and meaning, the one source of all peace and happiness and joy and hope. Where are you now? You have walked through the door from a place full of light into a place full of darkness. You have walked through the door whose entrance sign says, ‘Abandon all hope, you who enter here.’ You have exchanged heaven for hell. And if I left you alone and did nothing to bring you back, you would have absolutely no hope, forever. For I am not one of many hopes, one of your many options for truth and goodness and joy. There is no other. It’s God or nothingness. And you have chosen nothingness. That’s where you are now: you are in nothingness, you are nowhere.”
― Peter Kreeft, Food for the Soul: Reflections on the Mass Readings (Cycle B)

“A life without complaint, a life of perfect self-satisfaction, perfect self-acceptance, is not a good life; it is the worst of all possible lives. To be separated from God by sin is bad enough, but to be satisfied in that separation is far worse. Our secular psychologists preach self-acceptance, to just accept ourselves as we are. That is their highest praise. It is in fact the most dangerous of all sins. It is called pride, and self-righteousness, and Phariseeism.”
― Peter Kreeft, Food for the Soul: Reflections on the Mass Readings (Cycle B)

“Faith and good works are one thing, not two.”
― Peter Kreeft, Food for the Soul: Reflections on the Mass Readings (Cycle B)

“The Bible calls death our “last enemy” (1 Cor. 15:26) and says that God did not invent death (Wis. 2:23–24). When someone we love dies, we should not say that “God took him” but that death took him, but God took death.”
― Peter Kreeft, Food for the Soul: Reflections on the Mass Readings (Cycle B)

“Human life itself, every individual life, is a story, and the point of the story always comes at the end: that the apparent end, death, is really the beginning of eternal life.”
― Peter Kreeft, Food for the Soul: Reflections on the Mass Readings (Cycle B)

“Our repentance unglues us from our sins, and our faith and love glue us to God. We need both.”
― Peter Kreeft, Food for the Soul: Reflections on the Mass Readings (Cycle B)

“Confession is like a bathroom, and Communion is like a dining room. You wash the dirt off before you eat.”
― Peter Kreeft, Food for the Soul: Reflections on the Mass Readings (Cycle B)

“some time in purgatory to purge our remaining sinful habits). The flower or fruit is love, the works of love, which come from the very same divine life in us that began in the roots and grew in the stem.”
― Peter Kreeft, Food for the Soul: Reflections on the Mass Readings (Cycle B)