Karl Barth Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What happened on that day (of Easter) became, was and remained the centre around which everything else moves. For everything lasts its time, but the love of God - which was at work and was expressed in the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead - lasts forever. Because this event took place, there is no reason to despair, and even when we read the newspaper with all its confusing and frightening news, there is every reason to hope.

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

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

Faith is not an art. Faith is not an achievement. Faith is not a good work of which some may boast while others can excuse themselves with a shrug of the shoulders for not being capable of it. It is a decisive insight of faith itself that all of us are incapable of faith in ourselves, whether we think of its preparation, beginning, continuation, or completion.

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?

Joy is the simplest form of gratitude.

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

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

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

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

Radically and basically, all sin is simply ingratitude.

On the basis of the eternal will of God we have to think of EVERY HUMAN BEING, even the oddest, most villainous or miserable, as one to whom Jesus Christ is Brother and God is Father; and we have to deal with him on this assumption. If the other person knows that already, then we have to strengthen him in the knowledge. If he does no know it yet or no longer knows it, our business is to transmit this knowledge to him.

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.

Theology is not a private subject for theologians only. Nor is it a private subject for professors. Fortunately, there have always been pastors who have understood more about theology than most professors. Nor is theology a private subject of study for pastors. Fortunately, there have repeatedly been congregation members, and often whole congregations, who have pursued theology energetically while their pastors were theological infants or barbarians. Theology is a matter for the Church.

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

Man can certainly keep on lying (and does so), but he cannot make truth falsehood.

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

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