Hans Urs von Balthasar Quotes

When I was about 15 years old, I began to embark on an MC career but also to study philosophy with an emphasis on theology.

While there I began to study the Asian religions as theories of mind.

In praising science, it does not follow that we must adopt the very poor philosophies which scientific men have constructed. In philosophy they have much more to learn than to teach.

I don't think the scientific method and the science fictional method are really analogous. The thing about them is that neither is really practiced very much, at least not consciously. But the fact that they are methodical does relate them.

Reason can be used only when looking critically back.

I love religion and have contemplated going back to school to get a world religion degree.

I'm fascinated by religion, but I'm not particularly religious.

I like to read about different religions - Judaism, Islam, Christianity, Hinduism and Buddhism.

Fruitful discourse in science or theology requires us to believe that within the contexts of normal discourse there are some true statements.

To be a real philosopher all that is necessary is to hate some one else's type of thinking.

I am very interested in theology. In fact, my first degree was in theology, so it's something that interests me greatly.

As a universal history of philosophy, the history of philosophy must become one great unity.

Philosophical theories or ideas, as points of view, instruments of criticism, may help us to gather up what might otherwise pass unregarded by us.

Philosophers, as things now stand, are all too fond of offering criticism from on high instead of studying and understanding things from within.

I'm a theorist, not an institutionalist.

I teach in the Divinity School at Duke University, a very secular university. But before Duke, I taught fourteen years at the University of Notre Dame.

Philosophy likes to keen common sense on the run.

The true function of philosophy is to educate us in the principles of reasoning and not to put an end to further reasoning by the introduction of fixed conclusions.

The reason I spend so much of my time doing science is that the whole point of science is to help people resolve conflicting claims by saying: 'Show me the data.'

Then I studied theology in college, and when I was getting a Ph.D. in literature, I took courses in New Testament studies and studied Greek versions of the Gospels.

[It has become] … a principal ground whereon was reared up that Speculating phalanx.

During my academical life, and from this time forward, I was indefatigable in my search after truth. I read all the authors of greatest repute, for and against the Trinity, original sin, and the most disputed doctrines, but I was not yet of an understanding sufficiently ripe for impartial decision, and all my inquiries terminated in Calvinism.

Some sciences need mutual support and assistance to develop. The majority of these are physical sciences. Mutual support has almost no use in other disciplines, such as attainment of intuitive knowledge of God or spiritual progress.

Digging into the creation of the Puritan mind-set involved really trying to wrap my head around extreme Calvinism and what that's all about. I now understand predestination, and I had to read the Geneva Bible cover-to-cover and read the gospels quite a bit to get into that world.

The first thing you get from the humanities, when they're well taught, is critical thinking. Philosophy in particular can play that role, not just in universities but in schools as well.