Quotes by Hildebrand

“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.””

“Strong lives are motivated by dynamic purposes.””

“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.””

“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.””

“Just as our parents' souls revolted against God, their bodies revolted against their souls, to which they had been subject. And they realized 'that they were naked.””

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

“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.””

“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.””

“The Liturgy is Christ praying.””

“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.””

“Conjugal love, like romantic love, wants to be heroic; but it does not limit arbitrarily the scope of this heroism. In its desire to relate itself existentially to heroism, it will find it also in the modest deeds of everyday life, and will transform the tiresome routine of daily duties into golden threads binding oneself closer and closer to the beloved. There is in conjugal love a note of truth which is lacking in romantic love. It is a love that has been tested in the furnace of everyday trials and difficulties and had come out victoriously [...] To be kind and loveable for a moment is no great feat. But to be loving day after day in the most varied and trying circumstances can be achieved only by a man who truly loves.””

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

“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””