Top 90 Karl Barth Quotes (2025 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. “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

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

— Karl Barth

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

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

— Karl Barth

12. “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

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

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

— Karl Barth

18. “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

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

— Karl Barth

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

— Karl Barth

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

— Karl Barth

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

— Karl Barth

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

— Karl Barth

24. “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

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

— Karl Barth

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

— Karl Barth

27. “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

28. “I had to show that the Bible dealt with an encounter between God and Man. I thought only of the apartness of God. What I had to learn after that was the togetherness of Man and God a union of two totally different kinds of beings.”

— Karl Barth

29. “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

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

— Karl Barth

31. “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

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

— Karl Barth

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

— Karl Barth

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

— Karl Barth

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

— Karl Barth

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

— Karl Barth

37. “Faith is never identical with piety.”

— Karl Barth

38. “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

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

— Karl Barth

40. “Religion possesses no solution of the problem of life; rather it makes of the problem a wholly insoluble enigma. Religion neither discovers the problem nor solves it: what it does is to disclose the truth that it cannot be solved.”

— Karl Barth

41. “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

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

— Karl Barth

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

— Karl Barth

44. “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

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

— Karl Barth

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

— Karl Barth

47. “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

48. “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

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

— Karl Barth

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

— Karl Barth