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.

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.

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.

Martin Walser

#4. You cannot simply discard God like a box that has been emptied.

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.

Martin Walser

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

Martin Walser

#7. One can never be as naked, as exposed, in the flesh as one becomes in the mind

Martin Walser

#8. Everything direct is positive, everything indirect is negative.

Martin Walser

#9. I believe that the most important condition for faith is sensitivity to beauty.

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.

Martin Walser

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

Martin Walser

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

Martin Walser