Quotes from Karl Rahner

Knowing God is more important than knowing about God.

Grace is everywhere as an active orientation of all created reality toward God.

Every year we celebrate the holy season of Advent, O God. Every year we pray those beautiful prayers of longing and waiting, and sing those lovely songs of hope and promise.

Grace can and does have a history.

Learning always involves self-transcendence. Learning calls forth what is in us, helping us to move toward authenticity and wholeness.

Childhood is not a state which only applies to the first phase of our lives in the biological sense. Rather it is a basic condition which is always appropriate to a life that is lived aright.

The Christian of the future will be a mystic or he will not exist at all.

Love alone allows man to forget himself... it alone can still redeem even the darkest hours of the past since it alone finds the courage to believe in the mercy of the holy God.

What Christ gives us is quite explicit if his own words are interpreted according to their Aramaic meaning. The expression 'This is my Body' means this is myself.

The Christian of the future will be a mystic or he will not exist at all.

Every year we celebrate the holy season of Advent, O God. Every year we pray those beautiful prayers of longing and waiting, and sing those lovely songs of hope and promise.

How often I have found that we grow to maturity not by doing what we like, but by doing what we should. How true it is that not every 'should' is a compulsion, and not every 'like' is a high morality and true freedom.

In the days ahead, you will either be a mystic (one who has experienced God for real) or nothing at all.

When man is with God in awe and love, then he is praying.

The number one cause of atheism is Christians. Those who proclaim Him with their mouths and deny Him with their actions is what an unbelieving world finds unbelievable.

For it is the bitter grief of theology and its blessed task, too, always to have to seek (because it does not clearly have present to it at the time)...always providing that one has the courage to ask questions, to be dissatisfied, to think with the mind and heart one ACTUALLY has, and not with the mind and heart one is SUPPOSED TO have.

Childhood is not a state which only applies to the first phase of our lives in the biological sense. Rather it is a basic condition which is always appropriate to a life that is lived aright.

In the midst of our lives, of our freedom and our struggles, we have to make a radical, absolute decision. And we never know when lightening will strike us out of the blue. It may be when we least expect to be asked whether we have the absolute faith and trust to say yes

Meditating on the nature and dignity of prayer can cause saying at least one thing to God: Lord, teach us to pray!

The dead are silent because they live, just as we chatter so loudly to try to make ourselves forget that we are dying. Their silence is really their call to me, the assurance of their immortal love for me.

The task of the theologian is to explain everything through God, and to explain God as unexplainable.

It would be all right if I could pray in this way, or in that other way, if I were just able to give You the only thing You want: not my thoughts and feelings and resolutions, but myself. But that is just what I am unable to do, because in the superficiality of the ordinary routine into which my life is cast, I am a stranger to myself. And how can I seek You, being so distant, how can I give myself up to You, when I haven't been able as yet to find myself?

If we have been given the vocation and grace to die with Christ then the everyday and banal occurrence which we call human death has been elevated to a place among God's mysteries.

The Word is, by definition, immanent in the divinity and active in the world, and as such the Father's revelation. A revelation of the Father without the Logos and his incarnation would be like speaking without words.