Hans Urs von Balthasar > Quotes

“What you are is God's gift to you, what you become is your gift to God.”
― Hans Urs von Balthasar, Prayer

“It is to the Cross that the Christian is challenged to follow his Master: no path of redemption can make a detour around it.”
― Hans Urs von Balthasar, Unless You Become Like This Child

“We no longer dare to believe in beauty and we make of it a mere appearance in order the more easily to dispose of it. Our situation today shows that beauty demands for itself at least as much courage and decision as do truth and goodness, and she will not allow herself to be separated and banned from her two sisters without taking them along with herself in an act of mysterious vengeance. We can be sure that whoever sneers at her name as if she were the ornament of a bourgeois past -- whether he admits it or not -- can no longer pray and soon will no longer be able to love.”
― Hans Urs von Balthasar, Seeing the Form

“To be a child means to owe one's existence to another, and even in our adult life we never quite reach the point where we no longer have to give thanks for being the person we are.”
― Hans Urs von Balthasar, Unless You Become Like This Child

“Even if a unity of faith is not possible, a unity of love is.”
― Hans Urs von Balthasar

“The Church does not dispense the sacrament of baptism in order to acquire for herself an increase in membership but in order to consecrate a human being to God and to communicate to that person the divine gift of birth from God.”
― Hans Urs von Balthasar, Unless You Become Like This Child

“Above all we must not wish to cling to our suffering. Suffering surely deepens us and enhances our person, but we must not desire to become a deeper self than God wills. To suffer no longer can be a beautiful, perhaps the ultimate sacrifice.”
― Hans Urs von Balthasar

“Man is the creature with a mystery in his heart that is bigger than himself.”
― Hans Urs von Balthasar, Prayer

“God defines himself as "I am who I am", which also means: My being is such that I shall always be present in every moment of becoming.”
― Hans Urs von Balthasar, Unless You Become Like This Child

“Only the Christian religion, which in its essence is communicated by the eternal child of God, keeps alive in its believers the lifelong awareness of their being children, and therefore of having to ask and give thanks for things.”
― Hans Urs von Balthasar, Unless You Become Like This Child

“In Christ, for the first time, we see that in God himself there exists--within his inseparable unity--the distinction between the Father who gives and the Gift which is given (the Son), but only in the unity of the Holy Spirit.”
― Hans Urs von Balthasar, Unless You Become Like This Child

“What the Father gives is the capacity to be a self, freedom, and thus autonomy, but an autonomy which can be understood only as a surrender of self to the other.”
― Hans Urs von Balthasar, Unless You Become Like This Child

“For all his gentleness and humility unto death on the Cross, God does not relinquish his attribute of being judge and consuming fire. Nothing is more majestic than his Passion; even his anxiety is sublime. And God never denies his attributes to those who are his light in the world. They shine like stars in the cosmos, and even their anxiety, if God allows it, bears the marks of their divine destiny.”
― Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Christian and Anxiety

“Love alone is credible.”
― Hans Urs von Balthasar

“Her (Mary's) Son first had to be the Child of the Father in order then to become man and be capable of taking up on his shoulders the burden of a guilty world.”
― Hans Urs von Balthasar, Unless You Become Like This Child

“There will never be beings unloved by God, since God is absolute love.”
― Hans Urs von Balthasar, Dare We Hope That All Men Be Saved?

“Wonder—the enthusiastic ardor for the sublimity of being, for its worthiness to be an object of knowledge—promises to become the point of departure for genuine insight only where it has reached the stage in which the subject, overwhelmed by the object, has, as it were, fused into a single point or into nothing… like the movement of hope and love toward God, which is genuine and selfless only where it has assumed the attitude of pure worship of God for his own sake.”
― Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Christian and Anxiety

“Once a person learns to read the signs of love and thus to believe it, love leads him into the open field wherein he himself can love. If the prodigal son had not believed that the father's love was already waiting for him, he would not have been able to make the journey home - even if his father's love welcomes him in a way he never would have dreamed of. The decisive thing is that the sinner has heard of a love that could be, and really is, there for him; he is not the one who has to bring himself into line with God; God has always already seen in him, the loveless sinner, a beloved child and has looked upon him and conferred dignity upon him in the light of this love.”
― Hans Urs von Balthasar, Love Alone is Credible

“Faith's table is always laid, whether the invited guest sits down or stays away with a thousand excuses and pretexts.”
― Hans Urs von Balthasar, Prayer

“No fighter is more divine than one who can achieve victory through defeat. In the instant when he receives the deadly wound, his opponent falls to the ground, himself struck a final blow. For he strikes love and is thus himself struck by love. And by letting itself be struck, love proves what had to be proven: that it is indeed love.”
― Hans Urs von Balthasar, Heart of the World

“We do not build the kingdom of God on earth by our own efforts (however assisted by grace); the most we can do through genuine prayer, is to make as much room as possible, in ourselves and in the world, for the kingdom of God, so that its energies can go to work. All that we can show our contemporaries of the reality of God springs from contemplation: Jesus Christ, the Church, our own selves.”
― Hans Urs von Balthasar, Prayer

“It would be unjust toward children to introduce them to Christian teaching and existence only as little pagans and catechumens, in order to leave it up to them to choose the Faith on their own responsibility at a point in time difficult to determine.”
― Hans Urs von Balthasar, Unless You Become Like This Child

“Mary thus learns that the Most High has ever borne a Son in his bosom, and that this Son has now chosen her bosom as dwelling-place.”
― Hans Urs von Balthasar, Unless You Become Like This Child

“Every mystery of life has its origin in the heart.”
― Hans Urs von Balthasar, Heart of the World

“The Spirit of holiness and love is also the Spirit of wisdom and knowledge about love; and they are in fact one and the same Spirit: “Truth and love are inseparable wings—for truth cannot fly without love—and love cannot hover without truth”
― Hans Urs von Balthasar, Love Alone Is Credible

“The flight away from self to God is not a "forgetting self" in the sense that man thereby loses himself. Rather, in the experience of the Spirit there is bestowed on man the deepest possible experience of himself: for the Holy Spirit is a Spirit of revelation which illuminate the human spirit, in which it is immanent, by telling man what he is.”
― Hans Urs von Balthasar

“In the mother’s smile, it dawns on him that there is a world into which he is accepted and in which he is welcome, and it is in this primordial experience that he becomes aware of himself for the first time.”
― Hans Urs von Balthasar, Mary: The Church at the Source

“The saint is the apology for the Christian religion. He is holy, however, because he allows Christ to live in him and it is in Christ that he "glories".”
― Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Realm of Metaphysics in the Modern Age

“firstly, prayer is a conversation between God and the soul, and secondly, a particular language is spoken: God’s language. Prayer is dialogue, not man’s monologue before God.”
― Hans Urs von Balthasar, Prayer

“What you are is god's gift to you, What you make of yourself is your gift to god”
― Hans Urs von Balthasar