Martin Walser quotes:
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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.
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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.
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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.
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As an atheist, you cannot fully make sense of the music, you have no explanation for the perennial motion and rhythm.
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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.
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Everything direct is positive, everything indirect is negative.
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I believe that the most important condition for faith is sensitivity to beauty.
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If you cannot live without justification, you cannot live; period. And the path toward it is the path of language.
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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.
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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.
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Those who use language and have nothing but language to express themselves live in a cage that cannot feel comfortable.
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You cannot simply discard God like a box that has been emptied.