Quotes from Dietrich von Hildebrand

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

The Liturgy is Christ praying.

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.

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.

love typically gives rise to responsiveness regarding the beauty of a very specific individual taken as a whole rather than for values taken individually.

Anti-Semitism was clearly not just anti-Christian and immoral but also quite foolish.