Best 112 quotes of Karl Barth on MyQuotes

A being is free only when it can determine and limit its activity.

Abortion is 'the great modern sin.

A free theologian works in communication with other theologians...He waits for them and asks them to wait for him. Our sadly lacking yet indispensable theological co-operation depends directly or indirectly on whether or not we are wiling to wait for one another, perhaps lamenting, yet smiling with tears in our eyes.

All sin has its being and origin in the fact that man wants to be his own judge. And in wanting to be that, and thinking and acting accordingly, he and his whole world is in conflict with God. It is an unreconciled world, and therefore a suffering world, a world given up to destruction.

As ministers we ought to speak of God. We are human, however, and so cannot speak of God. We ought therefore to recognize both our obligation and our inability and by that very recognition give glory to God

Belief cannot argue with unbelief, it can only preach to it.

Christian worship is the most momentous, most urgent, most glorious action that can take place in human life.

Conscience is the perfect interpreter of life.

Dogmatics is the testing of Church doctrine and proclamation.

Faith in God's revelation has nothing to do with an ideology which glorifies the status quo.

Faith is not an art. Faith is not an achievement. Faith is not a good work of which some may boast while others can excuse themselves with a shrug of the shoulders for not being capable of it. It is a decisive insight of faith itself that all of us are incapable of faith in ourselves, whether we think of its preparation, beginning, continuation, or completion.

For the millions that suffer unjustly, the Confessing Church does not yet have a heart.

Grace must find expression in life, otherwise it is not grace.

Grace and gratitude belong together like heaven and earth. Gratitude evokes grace like the voice and echo. Gratitude follows grace as thunder follows lightning.

Grace and gratitude go together like heaven and earth.

Grace creates liberated laughter. The grace of God...is beautiful, and it radiates joy and awakens humor.

He [Jesus Christ] is the Master of all as the Servant of all.

Humor is the opposite of all self-admiration and self-praise.

I don’t believe in universalism, but I do believe in Jesus Christ, the reconciler of all

If I have a system it is limited to a recognition of what Kierkegaard called 'the infinite qualitative distinction' between time and eternity

I had to show that the Bible dealt with an encounter between God and Man. I thought only of the apartness of God. What I had to learn after that was the togetherness of Man and God - a union of two totally different kinds of beings.

In Jesus, God wills to be true God not only in the height but also in the depth - in the depth of human creatureliness, sinfulness and mortality.

In the Church of Jesus Christ there can and should be no non-theologians.

It is always the case that when the Christian looks back, he is looking at the forgiveness of sins.

It may be that when the angels go about their task praising God, they play only Bach. I am sure, however, that when they are together en famille they play Mozart.

Jesus Christ, as he is attested to us in Holy Scripture, is the one Word of God whom we have to hear, and whom we have to trust and obey in life and in death.

Jesus does not give recipes that show the way to God as other teachers of religion do. He is himself the way.

Jews have God's promise and if we Christians have it, too, then it is only as those chosen with them, as guests in their house, that we are new wood grafted onto their tree.

'joy' in Phillippians is a defiant 'Nevertheless!' that Paul sets like a full stop against the Philippians' anxiety.

Joy is the simplest form of gratitude.

Laughter is the closest thing to the grace of God.

Let us hear what the Bible says and what we as Christians are called to hear together: By grace you have been saved.

Man can certainly flee from God... but he cannot escape him. He can certainly hate God and be hateful to God, but he cannot change into its opposite the eternal love of God which triumphs even in his hate.

Man can certainly keep on lying (and does so), but he cannot make truth falsehood.

Man can certainly keep on lying... but he cannot make truth falsehood. He can certainly rebel... but he can accomplish nothing which abolishes the choice of God.

Mozart creates music from a mysterious center, and so knows the limits to the right and the left, above and below. He maintains moderation.

Mozart's music always sounds unburdened, effortless, and light. This is why it unburdens, releases, and liberates us.

Mozart's music is an invitation to the listener to venture just a little out of the sense of his own subjectivity.

Mozart's music is free of all exaggeration, of all sharp breaks and contradictions. The sun shines but does not blind, does not burn or consume. Heaven arches over the earth, but it does not weigh it down, it does not crush or devour it.

No one can be saved - in virtue of what he can do. Everyone can be saved - in virtue of what God can do.

One drop of eternity is of greater weight than a vast ocean of finite things.

On the basis of the eternal will of God we have to think of EVERY HUMAN BEING, even the oddest, most villainous or miserable, as one to whom Jesus Christ is Brother and God is Father; and we have to deal with him on this assumption. If the other person knows that already, then we have to strengthen him in the knowledge. If he does no know it yet or no longer knows it, our business is to transmit this knowledge to him.

Our position is such that we can be rescued from eternal death and translated into life only by total and unceasing substitution, the substitution which God Himself undertakes on our behalf.

Radically and basically, all sin is simply ingratitude.

Religion is the possibility of the removal of every ground of confidence except confidence in God alone.

Scientific dogmatics must devote itself to the criticism and correction of Church proclamation and not just to a repetitive exposition of it.

Sin is not confined to the evil things we do. It is the evil within us, the evil which we are.

Society is now really ruled by its own logos; say rather by a whole pantheon of its own hypostases and powers... we are beginning to suspect that the idols are vain, but their demonic influence upon our lives is not thereby allayed. For it is one thing to entertain critical doubts regarding the god of this world, and another thing to perceive the dunamis, the meaning and might of the living God who is building a new world.

That the zeal for God's honor is also a dangerous passion, that the Christian must bring with him the courage to swim against the tide instead of with it... accept a good deal of loneliness, will perhaps be nowhere so clear and palpable as in the church, where he would so much like things to be different. Yet he cannot and he will not refuse to take this risk and pay this price... he belongs where the reformation of the church is underway or will again be underway.

The angels laugh at old Karl. They laugh at him because he tries to grasp the truth about God in a book of Dogmatics. They laugh at the fact that volume follows volume, and each is thicker than the previous ones. As they laugh, they say to one another, ‘Look! Here he comes now with his little pushcart full of volumes of the Dogmatics!’—and they laugh about the persons who write so much about Karl Barth instead of writing about the things he is trying to write about. Truly, the angels laugh.