Hans Urs von Balthasar Quotes

It is to the Cross that the Christian is challenged to follow his Master: no path of redemption can make a detour around it.

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

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.

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.

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.

There will never be beings unloved by God, since God is absolute love.

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.

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.

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.