Martin Walser Quotes

#1. Once you have awakened to the question of faith, you cannot simply return to your everyday agenda like a committed atheist could. You cannot retreat to the comforts of atheism. - Author: Martin Walser

#2. Take Bach or Schubert: Their music was dedicated to God but filled and shaped their worldly lives. If you are a committed atheist, you lean back and miss all the richness of that history. - Author: Martin Walser

#3. People who don't pay attention to the question of justification are often rather uninteresting, in my opinion. I am most fascinated by characters who struggle with the demands of justification. - Author: Martin Walser

#4. You cannot simply discard God like a box that has been emptied. - Author: Martin Walser

#5. Language corresponds only to itself. Intellectuals suffer from that. And once you begin to question language, you cannot stop at studying linguistics. Analytical philosophy becomes insufficient, artificial grammar becomes insufficient. - Author: Martin Walser

#6. As an atheist, you cannot fully make sense of the music, you have no explanation for the perennial motion and rhythm. - Author: Martin Walser

#7. One can never be as naked, as exposed, in the flesh as one becomes in the mind - Author: Martin Walser

#8. Everything direct is positive, everything indirect is negative. - Author: Martin Walser

#9. I believe that the most important condition for faith is sensitivity to beauty. - Author: Martin Walser

#10. You cannot spend 2,000 years trying to understand God and then simply abandon the question and declare that we're not interested in it anymore. - Author: Martin Walser

#11. Those who use language and have nothing but language to express themselves live in a cage that cannot feel comfortable. - Author: Martin Walser

#12. If you cannot live without justification, you cannot live; period. And the path toward it is the path of language. - Author: Martin Walser