Top 90 Karl Barth Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “A being is free only when it can determine and limit its activity.”

— Karl Barth

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

— Karl Barth

53. “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

54. “There does not exist any more a holy mountain or a holy city or holy land which can be marked on a map. The reason is not that God’s holiness in space has suddenly become unworthy of Him or has changed into a heathen ubiquity. The reason is that all prophecy is now fulfilled in Jesus, and God’s holiness in space, like all God’s holiness, is now called and is Jesus of Nazareth.”

— Karl Barth

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

— Karl Barth

56. “Agape is related to Eros, as Mozart to Beethoven. How could they possibly be confused?”

— Karl Barth

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

— Karl Barth

58. “Men have never been good, they are not good and they never will be good.”

— Karl Barth

59. “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

60. “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

61. “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

62. “Mozart’s music always sounds unburdened, effortless, and light. This is why it unburdens, releases, and liberates us.”

— Karl Barth

63. “No act of man can claim to be more than an attempt, not even science.”

— Karl Barth

64. “The very names Kierkegaard, Luther, Calvin, Paul and Jeremiah suggest what Schleiermacher never possessed, a clear and direct apprehension of the truth that man is made to serve God and not God to serve man.”

— Karl Barth

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

— Karl Barth

66. “All sin has its being and origin in the fact that man wants to be his own judge. And in wanting to be that, and thinking and acting accordingly, he and his whole world is in conflict with God. It is an unreconciled world, and therefore a suffering world, a world given up to destruction.”

— Karl Barth

67. “Mozart’s music is an invitation to the listener to venture just a little out of the sense of his own subjectivity.”

— Karl Barth

68. “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

69. “The term ‘laity’ is one of the worst in the vocabulary of religion and ought to be banished from the Christian conversation.”

— Karl Barth

70. “Conscience is the perfect interpreter of life.”

— Karl Barth

71. “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

72. “For the millions that suffer unjustly, the Confessing Church does not yet have a heart.”

— Karl Barth

73. “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

74. “Faith in God’s revelation has nothing to do with an ideology which glorifies the status quo.”

— Karl Barth

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

— Karl Barth

76. “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

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

— Karl Barth

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

— Karl Barth

79. “In dogmatics our question is: What are we to think and say?”

— Karl Barth

80. “The Spirit bears witness. Ecstasy and enlightenment, inspiration and intuition are not necessary. Happy is the man who is worthy of these; but woe unto us if we wait for such experiences; woe unto us if we do not perceive that these things are of secondary importance.”

— Karl Barth

81. “Our position is such that we can be rescued from eternal death and translated into life only by total and unceasing substitution, the substitution which God Himself undertakes on our behalf.”

— Karl Barth

82. “God has not the slightest need for our proofs.”

— Karl Barth

83. “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

84. “The author says that theologian operates with windows open to the interest of the world, but also with a skylight that allows full awareness of prayer.”

— Karl Barth

85. “In the Credo the Church bows before that God Whom we did not seek and find – Who rather has sought and found us. Now.”

— Karl Barth

86. “What is offered to man’s apprehension in any specific revelation of Christ is the living God himself.”

— Karl Barth

87. “No one can become and remain a theologian unless he is compelled again and again to be astonished at himself.”

— Karl Barth

88. “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.”

— Karl Barth

89. “True theology is an actual determination and claiming of man by the acting God.”

— Karl Barth

90. “God transcends even the undertakings of evangelical theologians.”

— Karl Barth

91. “The church speaks finally in that it prays for the world.”

— Karl Barth

92. “A quite specific astonishment stands at the beginning of every theological perception, inquiry, and thought.”

— Karl Barth

93. “Where dogmatics exists at all, it exists only with the will to be a Church dogmatics, a dogmatics of the ecumenical Church.”

— Karl Barth

94. “To wish to withstand the Holy Spirit would be the one unforgivable sin.”

— Karl Barth

95. “Christendom and the theological world were always ill-advised in thinking it their duty for some reason or other, either of enthusiasm or of theological conception, to pitch their tents in opposition to reason.”

— Karl Barth