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God listens to Bach while the angels listen to Mozart.

Karl Barth

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Karl Barth
Age: 82 †
Born: 1886
Born: May 10
Died: 1968
Died: December 10
Pastor
Theologian
University Teacher
Basle
Bach
Mozart
Listens
Angels
Angel
Listen

More quotes by Karl Barth

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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
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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
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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.
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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.
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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
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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
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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
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Radically and basically, all sin is simply ingratitude.
Karl Barth
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Abortion is 'the great modern sin.
Karl Barth
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A being is free only when it can determine and limit its activity.
Karl Barth
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It may be that when the angels go about their task praising God, they play only Bach. I am sure, however, that when they are together en famille they play Mozart.
Karl Barth
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A free theologian works in communication with other theologians...He waits for them and asks them to wait for him. Our sadly lacking yet indispensable theological co-operation depends directly or indirectly on whether or not we are wiling to wait for one another, perhaps lamenting, yet smiling with tears in our eyes.
Karl Barth
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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
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What expressions we used - in part taken over and in part newly invented! above all, the famous 'wholly other' breaking in upon us 'perpendicularly from above,' the not less famous 'infinite qualitative distinction' between God and man, the vacuum, the mathematical point, and the tangent in which alone they must meet.
Karl Barth
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Humanity in its basic form is co-humanity.
Karl Barth
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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
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Whether the angels play only Bach praising God, I am not quite sure.
Karl Barth
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Mozart's music always sounds unburdened, effortless, and light. This is why it unburdens, releases, and liberates us.
Karl Barth
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We must read the Bible through the eyes of shipwrecked people for whom everything has gone overboard.
Karl Barth
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He [Jesus Christ] is the Master of all as the Servant of all.
Karl Barth