Dietrich von Hildebrand > Quotes

“Love is not concerned with a person’s accomplishments, it is a response to a person’s being: This is why a typical word of love is to say: I love you, because you are as you are.”
― Dietrich von Hildebrand, The Art of Living

“The great mystery of our metaphysical situation, that God is nearer to us than we are ourselves, is manifest in the fact that we cannot even be wholly ourselves—in the sense of individuality as a unique divine thought—until we are reborn in Christ.”
― Dietrich von Hildebrand, Transformation in Christ: On the Christian Attitude

“Humility involves the full knowledge of our status as creatures, a clear consciousness of having received everything we have from God.”
― Dietrich von Hildebrand, Humility: Wellspring of Virtue

“Happiness is love’s outcome, never its motive. Where someone is loved he is an end in himself and certainly not a means toward something else. It is therefore of love’s essence, wherever it is found, that the loved one seem precious, beautiful, and worthy of love.”
― Dietrich von Hildebrand, Man, Woman, and the Meaning of Love: God's Plan for Love, Marriage, Intimacy, and the Family

“For, just as love embodies the life of all virtues and expresses the inmost substance of all holiness, humility is the precondition and basic presupposition for the genuineness, the beauty, and the truth of all virtue.”
― Dietrich von Hildebrand, Humility: Wellspring of Virtue

“Love alone brings a human being to full awareness of personal existence. For it is in love alone that man finds room enough to be what he is.”
― Dietrich von Hildebrand, Man, Woman, and the Meaning of Love: God's Plan for Love, Marriage, Intimacy, and the Family

“Better to be a beggar in freedom than to be forced into compromises against my conscience. —”
― Dietrich von Hildebrand, My Battle Against Hitler: Defiance in the Shadow of the Third Reich

“The Liturgy is Christ praying.”
― Dietrich von Hildebrand, Liturgy and Personality

“The soldier of Christ is obligated to fight against sin and error. His battle against the Antichrist is prompted by his loved for Christ, and for the salvation of souls. He fights this battle for the salvation of those who have gone astray. His attitude is one of true love. But those who flee from the inevitable battle, and treat irenically those who have gone astray, obfuscating their error and playing down their revolt against God, are, fundamentally, victims of egoism and complacency.”
― Dietrich von Hildebrand

“When we love somebody, whether it be a friend, a parent, a child, whether it be conjugal love or neighborly love, the beloved person always stands before us as something precious and noble in himself.”
― Dietrich von Hildebrand, The Art of Living

“love typically gives rise to responsiveness regarding the beauty of a very specific individual taken as a whole rather than for values taken individually.”
― Dietrich von Hildebrand, Man, Woman, and the Meaning of Love: God's Plan for Love, Marriage, Intimacy, and the Family

“the one who desecrates the mystery of sex by seeing in it a harmless satisfaction of a bodily instinct, who approaches the world having extinguished the light of morality, moves in a dull, falsified world without depth, without thrill, without grandeur. His world is the magnified office of a psychoanalyst. He is not tragic; rather, he is immersed in hopeless boredom because it is the moral light, the great tension of good and evil, which elevates and widens human life beyond the frontiers of our earthly existence. As Kierkegaard said, “The ethical is the very breath of the eternal.”
― Dietrich von Hildebrand, Man, Woman, and the Meaning of Love: God's Plan for Love, Marriage, Intimacy, and the Family

“Anti-Semitism was clearly not just anti-Christian and immoral but also quite foolish.”
― Dietrich von Hildebrand, My Battle Against Hitler: Defiance in the Shadow of the Third Reich

“The more our life is permeated by God, the simpler it becomes. This simplicity is defined by the inward unity which our life assumes because we no longer seek for any but one end: God. No”
― Dietrich von Hildebrand, Transformation In Christ

“pride (superbia) is not only by itself
our primal sin: it also inwardly contaminates all intrinsically good dispositions and robs every virtue of its value before God.”
― Dietrich von Hildebrand, Humility: Wellspring of Virtue

“On the other hand, every virtue and every good deed turns worthless if pride creeps into it - which happens whenever in some fashion we glory in our goodness.”
― Dietrich von Hildebrand, Humility: Wellspring of Virtue

“the Liturgy is accomplished faith, lived faith. It plunges us into the full reality of the truth of faith; it creates the spiritual space in which the world of faith or, more correctly, the world disclosed by faith penetrates every pore of our being, in which we breathe the supernatural air; it brings us to the ultimate reality which, in the holy Sacrifice of the Mass and in the sacraments, we even touch ontologically.”
― Dietrich von Hildebrand, Liturgy and Personality

“There were a host of people who viewed my rejection of National Socialism as exaggerated and who perceived my sharp tone as un-Austrian. Even many Austrians whose political views were relatively good found my stance too abrupt and not in keeping with Austrian sensibilities.”
― Dietrich von Hildebrand, My Battle Against Hitler: Defiance in the Shadow of the Third Reich

“To whom will the sublime beauty of a sunset or a Ninth Symphony of Beethoven reveal itself, but to him who approaches it reverently and unlocks his heart to it? To whom will the mystery that lies in life and manifests itself in every plant reveal itself in its full splendor, but to him who contemplates it reverently? But he who sees in it only a means of subsistence or of earning money, that is, something that can be used or employed, will not discover the meaning, structure, and significance of the world in its beauty and hidden dignity.”
― Dietrich von Hildebrand, The Art of Living

“The basic attitude of reverence is the presupposition for every true love, above all, the love of neighbor, because it alone opens our eyes to the value of men as spiritual persons, and because, without this awareness, no love is possible. Reverence for the beloved one is also an essential element of every love. To give attention to the specific meaning and value of his individuality, to display consideration toward him, instead of forcing our wishes on him, is part of reverence. It is from reverence that there flows the willingness of a lover to grant the beloved the spiritual "space" needed to freely express his own individuality. All these elements of every true love flow from reverence. What would a mother's love be without reverence for the growing being, for all the possibilities of value that yet lie dormant, for the preciousness of the child's soul?”
― Dietrich von Hildebrand, The Art of Living

“[On "baptizing" all of our actions:] "In constant awareness of our determination to belong to Christ and to perform all our activities as His servants, we must incorporate even the trivial details of our daily routine into the essential meaning and direction of our life." [Chapter 5, True Simplicity, p. 94]”
― Dietrich von Hildebrand

“Contact with an environment permeated by beauty not only offers real protection against impurity, baseness, every kind of letting oneself go, brutality, and untruthfulness; it has also the positive effect of raising us up in a moral sense. It does not draw us into a self-centered pleasure where our only wish is to indulge ourselves. On the contrary, it opens our hearts, inviting us to transcendence and leading us in conspectu Dei (“before the face of God”), before the face of God. Naturally, this last point applies above all to the high, exalted beauty which Kant calls the “sublime” [das Erhabene] and which he contrasts with the “beautiful.” But even in little things that are charming and graceful, even in the more modest beautiful things, one can find a trace of the pure and the noble. This may perhaps not lead us in conspectu Dei, but it does fill us with gratitude to God. It frees us from captivity in our egoistic interests and undoes the fetters of our hearts, releasing us (even if only for a short time) from the wild passions that convulse them.”
― Dietrich von Hildebrand, Aesthetics Volume I

“architect Gropius.”
― Dietrich von Hildebrand, My Battle Against Hitler: Defiance in the Shadow of the Third Reich

“Reverence for the beloved one is also an essential element of every love. To give attention to the specific meaning and value of his individuality, to display consideration toward him, instead of forcing our wishes on him, is part of reverence. It is from reverence that there flows the willingness of a lover to grant the beloved the spiritual “space” needed to freely express his own individuality. All these elements of every true love flow from reverence. What would a mother’s love be without reverence for the growing being, for all the possibilities of values that yet lie dormant, for the preciousness of the child’s soul?”
― Dietrich von Hildebrand, The Art of Living

“Que Cristo nos ama es el gran secreto, el secreto más íntimo de cada alma. Es la realidad más inconcebible; es una realidad que cambiaría completamente la vida de cualquiera que se diera cuenta de ello plenamente. Pero para darse cuenta de ello no basta un mero conocimiento teórico, sino una vivencia de este amor similar a la que se tiene del amor de la persona amada. (p. 16)”
― Dietrich von Hildebrand, The Heart: An Analysis of Human and Divine Affectivity

“Si alguien ama a una mujer y ella, en vez de corresponderle, le dice que solo tiene la voluntad de amarle, esto es evidentemente un muy triste sucedáneo del amor y aquel siente con razón que la mujer no le entrega su verdadero yo, porque su corazón no le ha hablado. Mientras ella solo tiene la voluntad de amarle, no se ha verificado la unidad espiritual pretendida en su amor, a la que aspira la 'intentio unionis' del amor y que solo el amor correspondido puede dar. (p. 25-26)”
― Dietrich von Hildebrand, Las formas espirituales de la afectividad

“No seu núcleo último, a falsidade significa negar a Deus, fugir de Deus.”
― Dietrich von Hildebrand

“The relevance of von Hildebrand’s story has by no means diminished. Extremist ideologies are again growing around us, and we hesitate to describe them in their own language, for fear of provoking them to pursue their aims. Reading von Hildebrand reminds us that there is only one sure remedy against an ideology of hate, and that is to expose it to public criticism and to affirm what it denies. The ardent faith that inspired von Hildebrand is not easily recovered in our skeptical times. But through his love of truth and his brave opposition to a public culture of deception, he bore witness to values that we still share. Philosophy, for von Hildebrand, was a way of life and a commitment to freedom, in the face of ideologies that promise utopia while causing only destruction and death.”
― Dietrich von Hildebrand, My Battle Against Hitler: Defiance in the Shadow of the Third Reich

“Yet our life will acquire immutability in the degree in which we are transformed in Christ. So long as we evade being thus transformed, and insist on maintaining ourselves, this remaining fixed in our own nature cannot but deliver us up to the world of flux and reflux, and the forces of change. Such a solidification would actually mean an imprisonment within the precincts of our own changeable selves: it would prevent us from transcending our limitations as vital beings and from being drawn into the sphere of divine unchangeableness.”
― Dietrich von Hildebrand, Transformation In Christ