Karl Barth Short Quotes

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Conscience is the perfect interpreter of life.

Karl Barth
Laughter is the closest thing to the grace of God.

Karl Barth
The goal of human life is not death but resurrection.

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

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

Karl Barth
A being is free only when it can determine and limit its activity.

Karl Barth
Men have never been good, they are not good and they never will be good.

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

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

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

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

Karl Barth
True theology is an actual determination and claiming of man by the acting God.

Karl Barth
Eternity is here (in the stable at Bethlehem and on the cross of Calvary) in time.

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

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

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

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

Karl Barth
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
I do not preach universal salvation, what I say is that I cannot exclude the possibility that God would save all men at the Judgment.

Karl Barth
We begin by stating that religion is unbelief. It is a concern, indeed, we must say that it is the one great concern, of godless man...

Karl Barth
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
While it is beyond our comprehension that eternity should meet us in time, yet it is true because in Jesus Christ eternity has become time.

Karl Barth
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
If I have a system it is limited to a recognition of what Kierkegaard called 'the infinite qualitative distinction' between time and eternity

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

Karl Barth
Who God is and what it is to be divine is something we have to learn where God has revealed Himself and His nature, the essence of the divine.

Karl Barth
God is personal, but personal in an incomprehensible way, in so far as the conception of his personality surpasses all our views of personality.

Karl Barth
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
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.

Karl Barth
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.

Karl Barth