Barth's Quotes

#1. 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

#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. Joy is the simplest form of gratitude.

Karl Barth

#4. 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

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

Karl Barth

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

John Barth

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

Karl Barth

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

Markus Barth

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

Karl Barth

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

Karl Barth

#11. 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

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

John Barth

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

John Barth

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

John Barth

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

Karl Barth

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

John Barth

#17. 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

#18. Faith is never identical with piety.

Karl Barth

#19. 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

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

Karl Barth

#21. 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

#22. 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

#23. 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

#24. 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

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

Karl Barth

#26. 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

#27. One of the things I miss about teaching is that students would tell me what I ought to read. One of my students, back in the 1960s, put me onto Borges, and I remember another mentioning Flann O'Brien's At Swim Two-Birds in the same way.

John Barth

#28. The story of your life is not your life; it's your story.

John Barth

#29. Is man a savage at heart, skinned o'er with fragile Manners? Or is savagery but a faint taint in the natural man's gentility, which erupts now and again like pimples on an angel's arse?

John Barth

#30. Path's should be laid where people walk, instead of walking where paths are laid-

John Barth

#31. I try things and fail at them all the time. It's called living with no regrets.

Christi Barth

#32. I long ago learned that one's illnesses are both pleasanter and more useful if one keeps their exact nature to himself: one's friends, uncertain as to the cause of one's queer behavior and strange sufferings, impute to one a mysteriousness often subtly convenient.

John Barth

#33. The wisdom to recognize and halt follows the know-how to pollute past rescue. The treaty's signed, but the cancer ticks in your bones. Until I'd murdered my father and fornicated my mother I wasn't wise enough to see I was Oedipus.

John Barth

#34. A man's most useful friend and fearsome foe is the poet.

John Barth

#35. One reason for not writing a lost-in-the-funhouse story is that either everybody's felt what Ambrose feels, in which case it goes without saying, or else no normal person feels such things, in which case Ambrose is a freak.

John Barth

#36. When you look at this mirror I hope you'll remember that there's always another way of seeing things: that's the beginning of wisdom.

John Barth

#37. 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

#38. Only in living by the effect of Christ's sacrifice and after its pattern can the saints find out and attempt to do 'what pleases the Lord

Markus Barth

#39. It's easier and sociabler to talk technique than it is to make art.

John Barth

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

Timothy Keller

#41. Innocence is ignorance; ignorance is illusion; and Commencement, while it certainly is a metaphor, is no illusion. Commencement's for the disillusioned, not for the innocent.

John Barth

#42. I don't see how anybody starts a novel without knowing how it's going to end. I usually make detailed outlines: how many chapters it will be and so forth.

John Barth

#43. The Bible is not man's word about God, but God's word about man.

John Barth

#44. Every artist joins a conversation that's been going on for generations, even millennia, before he or she joins the scene.

John Barth

#45. Though life's tuition is always ruinous, inexorably we learn.

John Barth

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

Karl Barth

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

Karl Barth

#48. You take ordinary things and turn them rainbow bright. It's what makes you so special.

Christi Barth

#49. 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.

Karl Barth

#50. 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

#51. 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

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

Karl Barth

#53. 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

#54. 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

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

Karl Barth

#56. 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

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

Karl Barth

#58. 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

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

Karl Barth

#60. 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

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

John Barth

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

Karl Barth

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

Karl Barth

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

John Barth

#65. 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

#66. ... 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

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

Karl Barth

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

John Barth

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

Karl Barth

#70. 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

#71. 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

#72. 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

#73. 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

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

John Barth

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

Karl Barth

#76. 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

#77. 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

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

John Barth

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

Karl Barth

#80. 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

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

Karl Barth

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

Karl Barth

#83. 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

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

Karl Barth

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

Karl Barth

#86. 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

#87. 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

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

Karl Barth

#89. 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

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

Karl Barth

#91. 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

#92. 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

#93. 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

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

Jessica Barth

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

John Barth

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

Karl Barth

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

Karl Barth

#98. 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

#99. 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

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

John Barth