Hans Urs von Balthasar Quotes

If the infinite had no me, then me would be its limit. It would not be the infinite, therefore it would not be.

Either it is the fold of the infinite, or the constant folds [replis] of finitude which curve the outside and constitute the inside.

If in the infinite you want to stride, Just walk in the finite to every side.

God is the tangential point between zero and infinity.

Numbers are limits, and perfection doesn't have limits.

There is zero, and there is eternity, and there is mortality, but there is no ultimate.

If you reject the infinite, you are stuck with the finite, and the finite is parochial... the best explanation of anything eventually involves universality, and therefore infinity. The reach of explanations cannot be limited by fiat.

It is the infinite alone that cannot be attained, for if it could it would become finite.

The infinite we shall do right away. The finite may take a little longer.

To the infinite, all finites are equal.

The end of man (as a factual anthropological limit) is announced to thought from the vantage of the end of man (as a determined opening or the infinity of a telos ). Man is that which is in relation to his end, in the fundamentally equivocal sense of the word. Since always.

If you wish to advance into the infinite, explore the finite in all directions.

I feel awed by the mystery of being both so finite and yet so infinite, so much and so little, so conscious and yet, so coincidental.

Life without death and happiness without misery are contradiction and neither can be found alone, because each of them is a different manifestation of the same thing.

For after all what is man in nature? A nothing in relation to infinity, all in relation to nothing, a central point between nothing and all and infinitely far from understanding either. The ends of things and their beginnings are impregnably concealed from him in an impenetrable secret. He is equally incapable of seeing the nothingness out of which he was drawn and the infinite in which he is engulfed.

If creation was given no limit, ultimately everything would cease to exist.

It is life, more than death, that has no limits.

There must be some limit to the thing. It cannot go on to infinity.

For that which is without a beginning, a final cause need not be sought.

Blue has no dimensions, it is beyond dimensions.

Eternity is called whole, not because it has parts, but because it is lacking in nothing.

Everything that makes diversity of kinds, of species, differences, properties... everything that consists in generation, decay, alteration and change is not an entity, but a condition and circumstance of entity and being, which is one, infinite, immobile, subject, matter, life, death, truth, lies, good and evil.

I don't think of God as an old white man with no belly button, nor even an old black woman with no belly button. But I agree that God is something eternal. Something cannot come out of nothing. I believe God is Everything. And I believe in infinity.

Possibly the words materialism and spirituality express two sides of one and the same fact.

Neither concepts nor mathematical formulae can explain the infinite.