Karl Rahner

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

“Grace can and does have a history.”

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

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