That the zeal for God's honor is also a dangerous passion, that the Christian must bring with him the courage to swim against the tide instead of with it... accept a good deal of loneliness, will perhaps be nowhere so clear and palpable as in the church, where he would so much like things to be different. Yet he cannot and he will not refuse to take this risk and pay this price... he belongs where the reformation of the church is underway or will again be underway.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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