Inspirational Quotes by Karl Barth

“[O]nly where man communicates with man, only in speech, a social act, awakes reason. … It is not until man has reached an advanced stage of culture that he can double himself, so as to play the part of another within himself.”

“[L]et any one transport himself to the time when living, present miracles were believed in; … when they lived only in the rapturous prospect and hope of heaven … (for whatever heaven may be for them, so long as they were on earth, it existed only in the imagination); … a principle to which men joyfully sacrificed real life, the real world with all its glories; … It is no valid objection that miracles have happened, or are supposed to have happened, in the presence of whole assemblies: no man was independent, all were filled with exalted supranaturalistic ideas and feelings; all were animated by the same faith, the same hope, the same hallucinations.”

“Man … has the wish not to die. This wish is originally identical with the instinct of self-preservation. … Subsequently, … this primary negative wish becomes the positive wish for a life, and a better life, after death. … [T]his wish involves the further wish for the certainty of its fulfilment. Reason can afford no such certainty. … Such a certainty requires an immediate personal assurance, a practical demonstration. This can only be given to me by … a dead person … rising again from the grave; and he must be no indifferent person, but … representative of all others, so that his resurrection also maybe the … guarantee of theirs. The resurrection of Christ is … the satisfied desire of man for an immediate certainty of his personal existence after death[.]”

“[N]ature listens not to the plaints of man, it is callous to his sorrows. Hence man turns away from Nature, … He turns within, that here … he may find audience for his griefs. Here he utters his oppressive secrets; … he gives vent to stifled sighs.”

“According to Philo, God gave Moses power over the whole of Nature; all the elements obeyed him as the Lord of Nature. … Jehovah is Israel's consciousness of the sacredness and necessity of his own existence, - a necessity before which the existence of Nature, the existence of other nations, vanishes into nothing.”

“[M]an places the aim of his action in God, but God has no other aim of action than the moral and eternal salvation of man: thus man has in fact no other aim than himself.”

“God is the reason expressing, affirming itself as the highest existence. To the imagination, the reason is the revelation of God; but to the reason, God is the revelation of the reason[.]”

“Love recognises virtue even in sin, truth in error. … [L]ove is free, universal, in its nature[.]”

“God as God, … as a being not finite, not human, not materially conditioned, not phenomenal, is only an object of thought. … [H]e is known … only by abstraction and negation … There is no other spirit, no other intelligence which enlightens him, which is active in him. … The 'infinite spirit,' is therefore nothing else than the intelligence disengaged from the limits of individuality and corporeality[.]”

“To him who feels that Nature is lovely, it appears an end in itself, it has the ground of its existence in itself: … the question, Why does it exist? does not arise. … Nature, as it impresses his senses, has indeed had an origin, has been produced, but not created in the religious sense, … [H]e posits … as the ground of Nature, a force of Nature, - a real, present, visibly active force, as the ground of reality. … Anaxagoras (510-428BC : 'Life is a journey.'): - Man is born to behold the world. … [M]an contents himself, allows himself free play, … [with] the sensuous imagination alone. … [H]e lets Nature subsist in peace, and constructs his castles in the air. … When, on the contrary, man … is in disunion with Nature[,] he makes Nature the abject vassal of his selfish interest, of his practical egoism. … Nature or the world is made, created, the product of a command.”

“[I]f God as a subject is the determined, while the quality, the predicate, is determining, then in truth the rank of the godhead is due not to the subject, but to the predicate.”

“[T]ime is indifferent: its existence or non-existence depends only on the will. But this will is not its own will:- not only because a thing cannot will its non-existence, but for the prior reason that the world itself is destitute of will. Thus the nothingness of the world expresses the power of the will. … The existence of the world is therefore a momentary, arbitrary, i.e., unreal existence.”

“Providence has relation essentially to man. It is for man's sake that Providence makes of things whatever it pleases; it is for man's sake that it supersedes the authority and reality of a law otherwise omnipotent. … [W]e nowhere read that God, for the sake of brutes, became a brute – the very idea of this is, in the eyes of religion, impious and ungodly; or that God ever performed a miracle for the sake of animals or plants. On the contrary, we read that a poor fig-tree, because it bore no fruit at a time when it could not bear it, was cursed, purely in order to give man an example of the power of faith over Nature[.]”

“The general premiss of … belief is: man of himself can know nothing of God; all his knowledge is merely vain, earthly, human. … God is known only by himself. Thus we know nothing of God; for revelation is the word of God … [I]n revelation man … places revelation in opposition to human knowledge … ; here reason must hold its peace. But nevertheless the divine revelation is determined by the human nature. God speaks not to brutes or angels, but to men; hence he uses human speech and human conceptions. … God is … free in will; … but he is not free as to the understanding; he cannot reveal to man whatever he will, but only what is adapted to man, … [W]hat God thinks in relation to man is determined by the idea of man – it has arisen out of reflection on human nature. [H]e thinks of himself, not with his own thinking power, but with man's. … That which comes from God to man, comes to man only from man in God, … only from the ideal nature of man to the phenomenal man, from the species to the individual. Thus, between the divine revelation and the so-called human reason or nature, there is no other than an illusory distinction; … so in revelation man goes out of himself, in order, by a circuitous path, to return to himself!”

“[T]he effect of the creation, all its majesty for the feelings and the imagination, is quite lost if the production of the world … is not taken in its real sense.”

“Y sin duda nuestro tiempo... prefiere la imagen a la cosa, la copia al original, la representación a la realidad, la apariencia al ser... lo que es 'sagrado' para él no es sino la ilusión, pero lo que es profano es la verdad. Mejor aún: lo sagrado aumenta a sus ojos a medida que disminuye la verdad y crece la ilusión, hasta el punto de que el colmo de la ilusión es también para él el colmo de lo sagrado”

“I cannot so abstract myself from myself as to judge myself … ; another has an impartial judgement; through him I correct, complete, extend my own judgement, my own taste, my own knowledge.”

“But for the present age, which prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, representation to reality, appearance to essence [...] truth is considered profane, and only illusion is sacred. Sacredness is in fact held to be enhanced in proportion as truth decreases and illusion increases, so that the highest degree of illusion comes to 'be the highest degree of sacredness.”

“The true Christian not only feels no need of culture, because this is a worldly principle and opposed to feeling; he also has no need of (natural) love. … God supplies to him the want of love, of a wife, of a family. … [T]he man who does not deny his manhood, is conscious that he is only part of a being, which needs another part for the making up of the whole of true humanity. The Christian, on the contrary, in his excessive, transcendental subjectivity, conceives that he is, by himself, a perfect being. But the sexual instinct runs counter to this view; it is in contradiction with his ideal: the Christian must therefore deny this instinct.”

“[A]lthough the deeds opposed to love which mark Christian religious history, are in accordance with Christianity, and its antagonists are therefore right in imputing to it the horrible actions resulting from dogmatic creeds; those deeds nevertheless at the same time contradict Christianity, because Christianity is not a religion of faith, but of love also … Uncharitable actions, hatred of heretics, at once accord and clash with Christianity? how is that possible? … Christianity sanctions both the actions that spring out of love, and the actions that spring from faith without love. If Christianity had made love its only law, its adherents would be right, - the horrors of Christian religious history could not be imputed to it; … But Christianity has not made love free; … has not raised itself to the height of accepting love as absolute. … [B]ecause it is a religion, - and hence subjects love to the dominion of faith.”