Top 50 Hans Urs von Balthasar Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “What you are is God’s gift to you, what you become is your gift to God.”

— Hans Urs von Balthasar

2. “Without Easter, Good Friday would have no meaning. Without Easter, there would be no hope that suffering and abandonment might be tolerable. But with Easter, a way out becomes visible for human sorrows, an absolute future: more than a hope, a divine expectation.”

— Hans Urs von Balthasar

3. “Consequently, Christian meditation is entirely trinitarian and at the same time entirely human. In order to find God, no one need reject being human personally or socially, but in order to find God all must see the world and themselves in the Holy Spirit as they are in God’s sight.”

— Hans Urs von Balthasar

4. “Being disguised under the disfigurement of an ugly crucifixion and death, the Christ upon the cross is paradoxically the clearest revelation of who God is.”

— Hans Urs von Balthasar

5. “The greatest tragedy in the history of Christianity was neither the Crusades nor the Reformation nor the Inquisition, but rather the split that opened up between theology and spirituality at the end of the Middle Ages.”

— Hans Urs von Balthasar

6. “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

7. “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

8. “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

9. “Love alone is credible.”

— Hans Urs von Balthasar

10. “Lovers are the ones who know most about God; the theologian must listen to them.”

— Hans Urs von Balthasar

11. “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.”

— Hans Urs von Balthasar

12. “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.”

— Hans Urs von Balthasar

13. “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

14. “The Holy Spirit knows what a particular age’s most pressing need is far better than men with their programs.”

— Hans Urs von Balthasar

15. “The saints are never the kind of killjoy spinster aunts who go in for faultfinding and lack all sense of humor.”

— Hans Urs von Balthasar

16. “Thus it is necessary to commence from an inescapable duality: the finite is not the infinite.”

— Hans Urs von Balthasar

17. “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

18. “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

19. “It is impossible to contemplate the word without the serious intention of doing justice to it in practical behavior. It demands love for God and our neighbor, and does so with such immediacy and unmistakable urgency that it is pointless even to pause before this demand unless we are willing to respond.”

— Hans Urs von Balthasar

20. “There is a moment when the interior light of the “eyes of faith” becomes one with the exterior light that shines from Christ, and this occurs because man’s thirst, as he strives and seeks after God, is quenched as he finds repose in the revealed form of the Son.”

— Hans Urs von Balthasar

21. “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

22. “Prior to an individual’s encounter with the love of God at a particular time in history, however, there has to be another, more fundamental and archetypal encounter, which belongs to the conditions of possibility of the appearance of divine love to man.”

— Hans Urs von Balthasar

23. “Every mystery of life has its origin in the heart.”

— Hans Urs von Balthasar

24. “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

25. “We dwell in the place in which we are not traveling but are at home. The landscape of God’s self-revelation in Jesus Christ is our home. It is a landscape that we are never finished exploring, for new prospects are always emerging. Nevertheless, it is familiar to us and becomes all the more familiar the longer we reside there.”

— Hans Urs von Balthasar

26. “The work with which we embark on this first volume of a series of theological studies is a work with which the philosophical person does not begin, but rather concludes.”

— Hans Urs von Balthasar

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

27. “Instead, it is the reality that the God-forsaken one experienced in an eminent way because no one can even approximately experience the abandonment by God as horribly as the Son, who shares the same essence with the Father for all eternity.”

— Hans Urs von Balthasar

28. “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

29. “The first thing the Cross does is cross out the world’s word by a Wholly-Other Word, a Word that the world does not want to hear at any price. For the world wants to live and rise again before it dies, while the love of Christ wants to die in order to rise again in the form of God on the other side of death, indeed, IN death.”

— Hans Urs von Balthasar

30. “Perfection lies in fullness of journey. For this reason, never think you have arrived. Forget what lies behind you, reach out for what lies before you. Through the very change in which you lose what you have snatched up you will at last be transformed into what you crave for with such longing.”

— Hans Urs von Balthasar

31. “If God wishes to reveal the love that he harbors for the world, this love has to be something that the world can recognize, in spite of, or in fact in, its being wholly other.”

— Hans Urs von Balthasar

32. “In Mary this petition has been granted: she is, as it were, the open vessel of longing, in which life becomes prayer and prayer becomes life. Saint John wonderfully conveys this process by never mentioning Mary’s name in his Gospel. She no longer has any name except “the Mother of Jesus”.1 It is as if she had handed over her personal dimension, in order now to be solely at his disposal, and precisely thereby had become a person.”

— Hans Urs von Balthasar

33. “Only in Christ are all things in communion. He is the point of convergence of all hearts and beings and therefore the bridge and the shortest way from each to each.”

— Hans Urs von Balthasar

34. “A truth that is merely handed on, without being thought anew from its very foundations, has lost its vital power.”

— Hans Urs von Balthasar

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

— Hans Urs von Balthasar

36. “Christian obedience, by its very nature, has a heroic character.”

— Hans Urs von Balthasar

37. “When everything is blocked off,′ I was told by a dear friend who lives in Erfurt, “one must try to live in the interstices.′ Apparently, the Christians of the Apocalypse, though they did not bear the sign of the beast, had discovered or created such spaces. From islands like these, true culture, Christian culture, may spread across the earth. Many people are athirst for it.”

— Hans Urs von Balthasar

38. “The word of God can require something of me today that it did not require yesterday; this means that, if I am to hear this challenge, I must be fundamentally open and listening.”

— Hans Urs von Balthasar

39. “Man is the creature with a mystery in his heart that is bigger than himself.”

— Hans Urs von Balthasar

40. “The first attempt at a response: there must have been a fall, a decline, and the road to salvation can only be the return of the sensible finite into the intelligible infinite.”

— Hans Urs von Balthasar

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

41. “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

42. “Every kind of integralism, open or disguised, is contrary in principle to true catholicity, which can win to itself and comprise all things only if it delivers itself up and dies like the seed to rise again.”

— Hans Urs von Balthasar

43. “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

44. “Thus it seems that the Cross of Christ, laden with every sinful refusal of man, must stand at the very last extremity of hell; indeed, it must stand beyond hell, where the Son is forsaken by the Father in a way that only he can know.”

— Hans Urs von Balthasar

45. “There is much in Christianity which can be subjected to exact analysis. But the ultimate things are shrouded in the silent mysteries of God.”

— Hans Urs von Balthasar

46. “The Word, then, came into the world – came to what was his, but those who were his did not receive him. He beamed into the gloom, but the darkness turned away. Thus had love’s revelation to choose a struggle of life and death. God came into the world, but a bristling barrier of spears and shields was his welcome. His grace began to trickle, but the world made itself supple and impenetrable, and the drops fell to the ground.”

— Hans Urs von Balthasar

47. “In this sense, the methodological form that comes into play here is ultimately quite simple: Scripture is interpreted by Scripture. Scripture interprets itself. Attentive listening to Scripture’s own internal self-interpretation is very characteristic of Redemptoris Mater.”

— Hans Urs von Balthasar

48. “The Fathers of the Church say that prayer, properly understood, is nothing other than becoming a longing for God.”

— Hans Urs von Balthasar

49. “Such a person can see without “pre-judice”, that is, without judging in advance; he will judge only on the basis of what he has really seen for himself.”

— Hans Urs von Balthasar

50. “In the end, only something endowed with mystery is worthy of love. It is impossible to love something stripped of mystery; at best it would be a thing one uses as one sees fit.”

— Hans Urs von Balthasar