Top 90 Karl Barth Quotes (2024 Update)

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

— Karl Barth

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

— Karl Barth

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

— Karl Barth

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

— Karl Barth

5. “Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so?”

— Karl Barth

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

— Karl Barth

7. “Grace and gratitude belong together like heaven and earth. Gratitude evokes grace like the voice and echo. Gratitude follows grace as thunder follows lightning.”

— Karl Barth

8. “Sin scorches us most after it comes under the scrutinizing light of God’s forgiveness and not before.”

— Karl Barth

9. “I take the Bible far too seriously to take it literally.”

— Karl Barth

10. “God listens to Bach while the angels listen to Mozart.”

— Karl Barth

11. “Prayer without study would be empty. Study without prayer would be blind.”

— Karl Barth

12. “Laughter is the closest thing to the grace of God.”

— Karl Barth

13. “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

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

— Karl Barth

15. “Exegesis, exegesis, and yet more exegesis!”

— Karl Barth

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

— Karl Barth

17. “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

18. “Radically and basically, all sin is simply ingratitude.”

— Karl Barth

19. “There is no philosophy that is not to some extent also theology.”

— Karl Barth

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

— Karl Barth

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

— Karl Barth

22. “Grace and gratitude go together like heaven and earth.”

— Karl Barth

23. “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.”

— Karl Barth

24. “Abortion is ’the great modern sin.”

— Karl Barth

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

— Karl Barth

26. “Joy is the simplest form of gratitude.”

— Karl Barth

27. “The relation of this God with this man; the relation of this man with this God – this is the only theme of the Bible and of philosophy.”

— Karl Barth

28. “Humanity in its basic form is co-humanity.”

— Karl Barth

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

— Karl Barth

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

— Karl Barth

31. “I haven’t even read everything I wrote.”

— Karl Barth

32. “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.”

— Karl Barth

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

— Karl Barth

34. “Faith is never identical with piety.”

— Karl Barth

35. “What God chooses for us children of men is always the best.”

— Karl Barth

36. “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

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

— Karl Barth

38. “This much is certain, that we have no theological right to set any sort of limits to the loving-kindness of God which has appeared in Jesus Christ. Our theological duty is to see and understand it as being still greater than we had seen before.”

— Karl Barth

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

— Karl Barth

40. “The Christian Church does not exist in Heaven, but on earth and in time.”

— Karl Barth

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

— Karl Barth

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

— Karl Barth

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

— Karl Barth

44. “The enterprise of Adolf Hitler, with all its clatter and fireworks, and all its cunning and dynamic energy, is the enterprise of an evil spirit, which is apparently allowed its freedom for a time in order to test our faith in the Resurrection of Jesus Christ.”

— Karl Barth

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

— Karl Barth

46. “A being is free only when it can determine and limit its activity.”

— Karl Barth

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

— Karl Barth

48. “Whether the angels play only Bach praising God, I am not quite sure.”

— Karl Barth

49. “The Devil may also make use of morality.”

— Karl Barth

50. “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