Karl Barth Quotes

To clasp the hands in prayer is the beginning of an uprising against the disorder of the world.

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

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

Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so?

When we speak of our virtues we are competitors, when we confess our sins we become brothers.

I take the Bible far too seriously to take it literally.

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

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

Joy is the simplest form of gratitude.

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?

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

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

I have read many books, but the Bible reads me.

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

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.

Prayer without study would be empty. Study without prayer would be blind.

Laughter is the closest thing to the grace of God.

Faith is never identical with piety even if it were the purest and finest.

The theologian who labors without joy is not a theologian at all. Sulky faces, morose thoughts and boring ways of speaking are intolerable in this field.

The resurrection of Jesus was like a boulder crashing into the pool of history.

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

The term 'laity' is one of the worst in the vocabulary of religion and ought to be banished from the Christian conversation.

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

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

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

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

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

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

There will be no song on our lips if there be no anguish in our hearts.

The person who knows only his side of the argument knows little of that.

When I come before these men I do not have to explain that we are all sinners. They have committed every sin there is. All I have to tell them is that I, too, am a sinner.

We must hold the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other.

To say revelation is to say, 'the Word became flesh...'

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

The gospel is not a truth among other truths. Rather, it sets a question mark against all truths.

Grace and gratitude go together like heaven and earth.

To be a Christian and to pray are one and the same thing; it is a matter that cannot be left to our caprice. It is a need, a kind of breathing necessary to life.

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.

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

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

God listens to Bach while the angels listen to Mozart.

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

Exegesis, exegesis, and yet more exegesis!

The theologian who labours without joy is not a theologian at all.