Beauty is the disinterested one, without which the ancient world refused to understand itself, a word which both imperceptibly and yet unmistakably has bid farewell to our new world, a world of interests, leaving it to its own avarice and sadness.

— Hans Urs von Balthasar

But the issue is not only life and death but our existence before God and our being judged by him. All of us were sinners before him and worthy of condemnation.

— Hans Urs von Balthasar

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

— Hans Urs von Balthasar

Every mystery of life has its origin in the heart.

— Hans Urs von Balthasar

For all his gentleness and humility unto death on the Cross, God does not relinquish his attribute of being judged 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

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

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

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

Instead, it is the reality that the Godforsaken 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

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