Even if a unity of faith is not possible, a unity of love is.
Hans Urs Von BalthasarRead
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.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote emphasizes that true autonomy and freedom come from selflessness and commitment to others.
Hans Urs Von Balthasar explores the concept that being a true self involves a blend of autonomy and surrender. He suggests that freedom is not merely about personal independence but is deeply intertwined with the relationships we have with others, where giving oneself to others ultimately leads to authentic self-expression and fulfillment.
Themes
AutonomySelfFreedomSurrenderOther
In practice
Example use cases
In a speech about community service, one could use this quote to highlight the importance of selflessness for collective well-being.
More from Hans Urs Von Balthasar
All 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.
Hans Urs Von BalthasarRead
A truth that is merely handed on, without being thought anew from its very foundations, has lost its vital power.
Hans Urs Von BalthasarRead
The Holy Spirit knows what a particular age's most pressing need is far better than men with their programs.
Hans Urs Von BalthasarRead
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 BalthasarRead
But the saints are never the kind of killjoy spinster aunts who go in for faultfinding and lack all sense of humor. (Nor should the Karl Barth who so loved and understood Mozart be regarded as such.)For humor is a mysterious but unmistakable charism inseparable from Catholic faith, and neither the "progressives" nor the "integralists" seem to possess it - the latter even less than the former.
Hans Urs Von BalthasarRead
Similar quotes
Each of us creates his or her own life largely by our attitude.
Earl NightingaleRead
There remains an experience of incomparable value . . . to see the great events of world history from below; from the perspective of the outcast, the suspects, the maltreated, the powerless, the oppressed, the reviled ---- in short, from the perspective of those who suffer . . . to look with new eyes on matters great and small.
Dietrich BonhoefferRead
Extreme positions are not succeeded by moderate ones, but by contrary extreme positions.
Friedrich NietzscheRead
I despair of the Republic! Such dreariness, such whining sallow women, such utter absence of the amenities, such crass food, crass manners, crass landscape!! What a horror it is for a whole nation to be developing without the sense of beauty, and eating bananas for breakfast.
Edith WhartonRead
It was for one minute that I saw him, but the hair stood upon my head like quills. Sir, if that was my master, why had he a mask upon his face?
Robert Louis StevensonRead
The commonest fallacy among women is that simply having children makes them a mother - which is as absurd as believing that having a piano makes one a musician.
Sydney J. HarrisRead