Barth Quotes

#1. I go to Saint Barth in the French West Indies for two weeks each year. That place is amazing. Amazing people, beautiful beaches, great wine, wonderful harbors ... It's incredibly romantic.

Brooke Burke

#2. Septon Barth's claim that the Valyrians came to Westeros because their priests prophesied that the Doom of Man would come out of the land beyond the narrow sea can safely be dismissed as nonsense, as can many of Barth's queerer beliefs and suppositions.

George R R Martin

#3. There seems to be a human instinct for prayer. Swiss theologian Karl Barth calls it our 'incurable God-sickness.'

Timothy Keller

#4. Barth's approach tears up any possibility of dialogue between faith and unfaith or between theology and other human sciences. Theology just says what it says on the basis of scripture, and that's that.

George Pattison

#5. Karl Barth said it well: "We have to read the Bible in one hand ... and the newspaper in the other." Our faith should not cause us to escape this world but to engage it.

Shane Claiborne

#6. The choices a writer makes within a tradition - preferring Milton to Moliere, caring for Barth over Barthelme - constitute some of the most personal information we can have about him.

Zadie Smith

#7. For Guy Davenport--whom he told me John Barth once called the last modernist--modernism is 'a renaissance of the archaic'.

Lance Olsen

#8. A reporter asked Barth what was the single most important theological discovery he'd made. After stopping to consider his answer carefully, Barth said, "Jesus loves me. This I know, for the Bible tells me so." Indeed, we can never outgrow that one great, majestic, and simple transforming truth.

Mark Driscoll

#9. The Bible itself has a hundred theologies.

(Karl Barth, January 27, 1959 to English Colloquia in Basel)

Raymond Kemp Anderson

#10. I was under the influence of the early modern masters, Fitzgerald and Steinbeck and Hemingway, especially, when I was a kid. I reacted against writers like Barth and John Hawkes. I did not care for the post-modernist stuff; my allegiance was to realism.

Robert Stone

#11. I like major theology. I like Karl Barth, and I like John Calvin, and I like Martin Luther. The scale of thinking and the power of integration that they're capable of from thinking in that scale is something that's really unique to theology.

Marilynne Robinson

#12. The philosopher is not an apologist; apologetic concern, as Karl Barth (the one living theologian of unquestionable genius) has rightly insisted, is the death of serious theologizing, and I would add, equally of serious work in the philosophy of religion.

Donald M. MacKinnon

#13. Fear of scholasticism is the mark of a false prophet. - KARL BARTH

R. Scott Clark

#14. Karl Barth once wittily remarked, One can not speak of God simply by speaking of man in a loud voice.

Sinclair B. Ferguson

#15. Barth (or Barthianism134) believed that the Scriptures are not the word of God, per se, but merely a witness to the word of God (Jesus Christ).135 Revelation is not a propositional statement about God; rather it is an event (Ereignis), an encounter, something that "happens" to an individual.

Michael J. Kruger

#16. When I am about to embark on a difficult journey, I comfort myself by reading the accounts of the great nineteenth-century travellers, men like Stanley, Burton, Speke, Burckhardt and Barth.

Tahir Shah

#17. What is offered to man's apprehension in any specific revelation of Christ is the living God himself.

Karl Barth

#18. I have remarked elsewhere that I regard the Almighty as not a bad novelist, except that He is a realist.

John Barth

#19. On observing 1963 America for the first time, the author says that organization and standardization to a certain degree compete with divine providence.

Karl Barth

#20. We act unbelievingly and disobediently when, for whatever motive, we distort, falsify, or suppress the facts about our life in nature and history.

Karl Barth

#21. Indeed, if I have yet to join the hosts of the suicides, it is because (fatigue apart) I find it no meaningfuller to drown myself than to go on swimming.

John Barth

#22. I'm sure fame is yet to come; however, it's not my ultimate goal. I really just want to be able to tell stories, and create, and do it for a living.

Jessica Barth

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

Karl Barth

#24. Too late she saw: what she'd favored him with in jest he had received with adoration.

John Barth

#25. Sin scorches us most after it comes under the scrutinizing light of God's forgiveness and not before

Karl Barth

#26. ... beg Love's pardon for your want of faith. Helen chose you without reason because she loves you without cause; embrace her without question and watch your weather change.

John Barth

#27. We must read the Bible through the eyes of shipwrecked people for whom everything has gone overboard.

Karl Barth

#28. Choosing is existence. To the extent that you don't choose, you don't exist,

John Barth

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

Karl Barth

#30. God listens to Bach while the angels listen to Mozart.

Karl Barth

#31. His head always felt about to ache, but never began to.

John Barth

#32. The mature and well-balanced man, standing firmly with both feet on the earth, who has never been lamed and broken an half-blinded by the scandal of life, is as such the existentially godless man.

Karl Barth

#33. A quite specific astonishment stands at the beginning of every theological perception, inquiry, and thought.

Karl Barth

#34. Character assassination is at once easier and surer than physical assault; and it involves far less risk for the assassin. It leaves him free to commit the same deed over and over again, and may, indeed, win him the honors of a hero in the country of his victims.

Alan Barth

#35. No one can become and remain a theologian unless he is compelled again and again to be astonished at himself.

Karl Barth

#36. I particularly scorn my fondness for paradox. I despise pessimism, narcissism, solipsism, truculence, word-play, and pusillanimity, my chiefer inclinations; loathe self-loathers ergo me; have no pity for self-pity and so am free of that sweet baseness. I doubt I am. Being me's no joke.

John Barth

#37. The church speaks finally in that it prays for the world.

Karl Barth

#38. With an ear open to your musical dialectic, one can be young and become old, can work and rest, be content and sad: in short, one can live.

Karl Barth

#39. Let your repentance salt my shoe leather," I said presently, "and then, as I lately sheathed my blade of anger, so sheath you my blade of love.

John Barth

#40. It's not difficult to be encyclopedic in a work of fiction; it's damned difficult to be encyclopedic, I suppose, in truth.

John Barth

#41. This is an exciting time. A new chapter in our history.

John Barth

#42. Finally you begin to make your mistakes on the highest level-let's say the upper slopes of slippery Parnassus-and it's at that point you need coaching.

John Barth

#43. In sum I'm not what either parent or I had in mind. One hoped I'd be astonishing, forceful, triumphant - heroical in other words. One dead. I myself conventional. I turn out I.

John Barth

#44. Agape is related to Eros, as Mozart to Beethoven. How could they possibly be confused?

Karl Barth

#45. The Church should be the place where a word reverberates right into the world.

Karl Barth

#46. Tis e'er the lot of the innocent in the world, to fly to the wolf for succor from the lion.

John Barth

#47. I was a huge fan of Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch.

Jessica Barth

#48. When the frontier between God and man, the last inexorable barrier and obstacle, is not closed, the barrier between what is normal and what is perverse is opened.

Karl Barth

#49. 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.

Karl Barth

#50. All the same, they [young, twenty-somethings] can't help feeling that the aged and even the infirm have somehow elected that condition ... or have as it were been assigned those roles ... so that they ... can play their youthful-energetic, all but immutable selves.

John Barth

#51. I haven't even read everything I wrote.

Karl Barth

#52. Everything is pointing to one's own activity of looking, to an awareness and sort of hyper-consciousness of visual perception. The only way I know how to invite this experience is by removing the other things (i.e., subject matter) for you to think about.

Uta Barth

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

Karl Barth

#54. Tis e'er the wont of simple folk to prize the deed and o'erlook the motive, and of learned folk to discount the deed and lay open the soul of the doer.

John Barth

#55. When we are at our wits' end for an answer, then the Holy Spirit can give us an answer. But how can He give us an answer when we are still well supplied with all sorts of answers of our own?

Karl Barth

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

Karl Barth

#57. Exactly halfway between exegesis and practical theology stands dogmatics,

Karl Barth

#58. And never mind that the lessons he meant to be helpful, his students always make people miserable with, and flunk anybody that disagrees with them!

John Barth

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

Karl Barth

#60. Everyone who has to contend with unbelief should be advised that he ought not to take his own unbelief too seriously.

Karl Barth

#61. 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

Karl Barth

#62. Heaven is the creation inconceivable to man; earth is the creation conceivable to him.

Karl Barth

#63. [Plot is] the gradual perturbation of an unstable homeostatic system and its catastrophic restoration to a new and complexified equilibrium.

John Barth

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

Karl Barth

#65. We have before us the fiendishness of business competition and the world war, passion and wrongdoing, antagonism between classes and moral depravity within them, economic tyranny above and the slave spirit below.

Karl Barth

#66. One way or another, no matter which theory of our journey is correct, it's myself I address; to whom I rehearse as to a stranger our history and condition, and will disclose my secret hope though I sink for it.

John Barth

#67. Thou shalt make no image, no abstraction, including none of THE American, THE Swiss, THE German.

Karl Barth

#68. He wishes he had never entered the funhouse. But he has. Then he wishes he were dead. But he's not. Therefore he will construct funhouses for others and be their secret operator
though he would rather be among the lovers for whom funhouses are designed.

John Barth

#69. The Truth lies not in the Yes and not in the No, but in the knowledge and the beginning from which the Yes and the No arise.

Karl Barth

#70. BLAM! BLOOEY!
Twin thunderstorms struck Chesapeake Bay at about the same hour two weeks apart in the last spring and summer of the eighth decade of the twentieth century of the Christian era and bracketed our story like artillery zeroing in.

John Barth

#71. The difference here 'twixt simple and witty folk, if the truth be known, is that your plain man cares much for what stand ye take and not a fart for why ye take it, while your smart wight leaves ye whate'er stand ye will, sobeit ye defend it cleverly.

John Barth

#72. No act of man can claim to be more than an attempt, not even science.

Karl Barth

#73. What I've learned is that the muses' decision to sing or not to sing is not based on the elevation of your moral purpose - they will sing or not, regardless.

John Barth

#74. Faith is never identical with piety.

Karl Barth

#75. The statement that 'God is dead' comes from Nietzsche and has recently been trumpeted abroad by some German and American theologians. But the good Lord has not died of this; He who dwells in the heaven laughs at them.

Karl Barth

#76. Intellectual discussion, after all, is the real joy of the winter of life, when other pleasures have flown, as it were.

John Barth

#77. Impossibility is more possible than everything which we hold to be possible.

Karl Barth

#78. Others live for the lie of love; Echo lives for her lovely lies, loves for their livening.

John Barth

#79. Nothing is intrinsically valuable; the value of everything is attributed to it, assigned to it from outside the thing itself, by people.

John Barth

#80. Nobody knew how to be what they were right.

John Barth

#81. Evangelical theology is modest theology, because it is determined to be so by its object, that is, by him who is its subject.

Karl Barth

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

Karl Barth

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

Karl Barth

#84. Peace on earth (Luke 2:14) is salvation for, not from, the world.

Markus Barth

#85. What God chooses for us children of men is always the best.

Karl Barth

#86. History - an account, mostly false, of events, mostly unimportant

John Barth

#87. Where dogmatics exists at all, it exists only with the will to be a Church dogmatics, a dogmatics of the ecumenical Church.

Karl Barth

#88. Joy is the simplest form of gratitude.

Karl Barth

#89. Holy Communion is offered to all, as surely as the living Jesus Christ is for all, as surely as all of us are not divided in him, but belong together as brothers and sisters, all of us poor sinners, all of us rich through his mercy. Amen.

Karl Barth

#90. There is no philosophy that is not to some extent also theology.

Karl Barth

#91. Self knowledge is always bad news.

John Barth

#92. My father and I used to watch movies all the time. That was our bonding time, so that's when I kind of fell in love with acting.

Jessica Barth

#93. The cry of revolt against such a god [a god which just affirms the world as it is] is nearer the truth than is the sophistry with which men attempt to justify him ...

Karl Barth

#94. In dogmatics our question is: What are we to think and say?

Karl Barth

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

Karl Barth

#96. Humanity in its basic form is co-humanity.

Karl Barth

#97. Take your Bible and take your newspaper, and read both. But interpret newspapers from your Bible.

Karl Barth

#98. The best theology would need no advocates; it would prove itself.

Karl Barth

#99. 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.

Karl Barth

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

Karl Barth