Martin Walser Quotes & Sayings

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

I believe that the most important condition for faith is sensitivity to beauty. — Martin Walser

If you cannot live without justification, you cannot live; period. And the path toward it is the path of language. — Martin Walser

As an atheist, you cannot fully make sense of the music, you have no explanation for the perennial motion and rhythm. — Martin Walser

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

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

You always know more than you think you know without being aware of it. You always remember best what has hurt most.
Memory is a reflex of the pain. Knowledge is the memory of the pain combined with the unconsciousness which we 'rationalize' via dreams or by means of reading literature. It is impossible to learn from someone else's experience unless we don't assume this experience as our own's, which we can achieve only by living it anew and from scratch. We can not live our lives at someone else's expense. Only life fraught with dangers and risks and lived as your own's deserves its name. Only selfish people do not live their lives as if they do not belong entirely to them. Cowardice equals a life that you refuse to live at its fullest and at its most dangerous. — Martin Walser

One can never be as naked, as exposed, in the flesh as one becomes in the mind — Martin Walser

You cannot simply discard God like a box that has been emptied. — Martin Walser

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

You cannot spend 2,000 years trying to understand God and then simply abandon the question and declare that we're not interested in it anymore. — Martin Walser

Those who use language and have nothing but language to express themselves live in a cage that cannot feel comfortable. — Martin Walser

Everything direct is positive, everything indirect is negative. — Martin Walser