Dietrich Von Hildebrand Quotes

#1. Beauty kindles love, and only the one who remains captivated by it, only the one who is intoxicated by it, only the one who remains a lover while he is investigating its essence, can hope to penetrate its essence.

Dietrich Von Hildebrand

#2. One saintly priest attracts more souls to Christ ... than do those who lack the imprint of their sacred office

Dietrich Von Hildebrand

#3. Purity perceives and respects the character of sex-its depth, seriousness, intimacy, and true home within wedded love, which alone makes possible the total and mutual gift of self.

Dietrich Von Hildebrand

#4. 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

#5. Better to be a beggar in freedom than to be forced into compromises against my conscience.

Dietrich Von Hildebrand

#6. There are really no serious arguments for communion in the hand. But there are the most gravely serious kinds of arguments against it.

Dietrich Von Hildebrand

#7. Humility involves the full knowledge of our status as creatures, a clear consciousness of having received everything we have from God.

Dietrich Von Hildebrand

#8. 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

#9. 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

#10. Sex is essentially deep. We become what we do with our bodies, and there is no deeper act than sex.

Dietrich Von Hildebrand

#11. The way to attain the virtue of mercy lies in our constant awareness of being encompassed by mercy.

Dietrich Von Hildebrand

#12. 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