Hans Urs von Balthasar Quotes

In Christ, for the first time, we see that in God himself there exists--within his inseparable unity...

Once a person learns to read the signs of love and thus to believe it, love leads him into the open ...

The person who prays and who wants to gain a deeper understanding of the word he desires to worship ...

What you are is God's gift to you, what you become is your gift to God.

We do not build the kingdom of God on earth by our own efforts (however assisted by grace); the most...

Unavoidably, the life of contemplation is an everyday life, a life of fidelity in small matters, sma...

Nevertheless, in a passage that is very often commented upon because it summarizes the entire salvif...

For all his gentleness and humility unto death on the Cross, God does not relinquish his attribute o...

Wonder—the enthusiastic ardor for the sublimity of being, for its worthiness to be an object of know...

The Church does not dispense the sacrament of baptism in order to acquire for herself an increase in...

Mary thus learns that the Most High has ever borne a Son in his bosom, and that this Son has now cho...

To be a child means to owe one's existence to another, and even in our adult life we never quite rea...

Instead, it is the reality that the God-forsaken one experienced in an eminent way because no one ca...

God defines himself as "I am who I am", which also means: My being is such that I shall always be pr...

Her (Mary's) Son first had to be the Child of the Father in order then to become man and be capable ...

It would be unjust toward children to introduce them to Christian teaching and existence only as lit...

Only the Christian religion, which in its essence is communicated by the eternal child of God, keeps...

What the Father gives is the capacity to be a self, freedom, and thus autonomy, but an autonomy whic...

It is to the Cross that the Christian is challenged to follow his Master: no path of redemption can ...

It is impossible to contemplate the word without the serious intention of doing justice to it in pra...

The flight away from self to God is not a "forgetting self" in the sense that man thereby loses hims...

Even if a unity of faith is not possible, a unity of love is.

Prior to an individual's encounter with the love of God at a particular time in history, however, th...

The inner reality of love can be recognized only by love.

Our situation today shows that beauty demands for itself at least as much courage and decision as do...

Not longer loved or fostered by religion, beauty is lifted from its face as a mask, and its absence ...

The full Christian experience, however, is not an individual experience which may be isolated from a...

But the issue is not only life and death but our existence before God and our being judged by him. A...

The flight away from self to God is not a "forgetting self" in the sense that man thereby loses hims...

Beauty is the disinterested one, without which the ancient world refused to understand itself, a wor...

Every mystery of life has its origin in the heart.

Perfection lies in fullness of journey. For this reason, never think you have arrived. Forget what l...

The first thing the Cross does is cross out the world's word by a Wholly-Other Word, a Word that the...