1.
Language corresponds only to itself. Intellectuals suffer from that. And once you begin to question language, you cannot stop at studying linguistics. Analytical philosophy becomes insufficient, artificial grammar becomes insufficient.
Martin Walser
2.
Take Bach or Schubert: Their music was dedicated to God but filled and shaped their worldly lives. If you are a committed atheist, you lean back and miss all the richness of that history.
Martin Walser
3.
You cannot spend two thousand years trying to understand God and then simply abandon the question and declare that we’re not interested in it anymore.
Martin Walser
4.
I believe that the most important condition for faith is sensitivity to beauty.
Martin Walser
5.
It is only true love when you have no choice. Love is the most highly valued disease that is identified by the symptom of You-can´t-help-it.
Martin Walser
6.
As an atheist, you cannot fully make sense of the music, you have no explanation for the perennial motion and rhythm.
Martin Walser
7.
Those who use language and have nothing but language to express themselves live in a cage that cannot feel comfortable.
Martin Walser
8.
Everything direct is positive, everything indirect is negative.
Martin Walser
9.
People who don't pay attention to the question of justification are often rather uninteresting, in my opinion. I am most fascinated by characters who struggle with the demands of justification.
Martin Walser
10.
If you cannot live without justification, you cannot live; period. And the path towards it is the path of language.
Martin Walser
11.
Once you have awakened to the question of faith, you cannot simply return to your everyday agenda like a committed atheist could. You cannot retreat to the comforts of atheism.
Martin Walser
12.
You cannot simply discard God like a box that has been emptied.
Martin Walser