Dietrich Bonhoeffer Quotations

One act of obedience is better than one hundred sermons.

If you do a good job for others, you heal yourself at the same time, because a dose of joy is a spiritual cure.

Human love has little regard for the truth. It makes the truth relative, since nothing, not even the truth, must come between it and the beloved person.

We must learn to regard people less in light of what they do or omit to do, and more in the light of what they suffer.

If you board the wrong train, it is no use running along the corridor in the other direction.

The ultimate test of a moral society is the kind of world that it leaves to its children.

Action springs not from thought, but from a readiness for responsibility.

God's truth judges created things out of love, and Satan's truth judges them out of envy and hatred.

It is the characteristic excellence of the strong man that he can bring momentous issues to the fore and make a decision about them. The weak are always forced to decide between alternatives they have not chosen themselves.

It is very easy to overestimate the importance of our own achievements in comparison with what we owe others.

A god who let us prove his existence would be an idol.

Gratitude changes the pangs of memory into a tranquil joy.

The essence of optimism is that it takes no account of the present, but it is a source of inspiration, of vitality and hope where others have resigned; it enables a man to hold his head high, to claim the future for himself and not to abandon it to his enemy.

Only he who believes is obedient and only he who is obedient believes.

It is the nature, and the advantage, of strong people that they can bring out the crucial questions and form a clear opinion about them. The weak always have to decide between alternatives that are not their own.

Politics are not the task of a Christian.

To endure the cross is not tragedy; it is the suffering which is the fruit of an exclusive allegiance to Jesus Christ.

Not everyone can wait: neither the sated nor the satisfied nor those without respect can wait. The only ones who can wait are people who carry restlessness around with them.

God can make a new beginning with people whenever God pleases, but not people with God. Therefore, people cannot make a new beginning at all; they can only pray for one. Where people are on their own and live by their own devices, there is only the old, the past.

Our community with one another consists solely in what Christ has done to each of us.

Let him who cannot be alone beware of community... Let him who is not in community beware of being alone... Each by itself has profound perils and pitfalls. One who wants fellowship without solitude plunges into the void of words and feelings, and the one who seeks solitude without fellowship perishes in the abyss of vanity, self-infatuation and despair.

Not until one person desires to keep his own bread for himself does hunger ensue.

[God says] Discipleship is not limited to what you can comprehend - it must transcend all comprehension. Plunge into the deep waters beyond your own comprehension, and I will help you to comprehend even as I do. Bewilderment is the true comprehension. Not to know where you are going is the true knowledge. My comprehension transcends yours.

A prison cell, in which one waits, hopes...and is completely dependent on the fact that the door of freedom has to be opened from the outside, is not a bad picture of Advent.

But the Christian also knows that he not only cannot and dare not be anxious, but that there is no need for him to be so. Neither anxiety now work can secure his daily bread, for bread is the gift of the Father.

Fruit is always the miraculous, the created; it is never the result of willing, but always a growth. The fruit of the Spirit is a gift of God, and only He can produce it. They who bear it know as little about it as the tree knows of its fruit. They know only the power of Him on whom their life depends

Time is lost when we have not lived a full human life, time unenriched by experience, creative endeavor, enjoyment, and suffering.

The will of God, to which the law gives expression, is that men should defeat their enemies by loving them.

The test of the morality of a society is what it does for its children.

the world exercises dominion by force and Christ and Christians conquer by service.

Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate.

In the gospels the very first step a man must take is an act which radically affects his whole existence.

Sometimes we just need a firm kick in the pants. An unsmiling expectation that if we mean all these wonderful things we talk about and sing about, then let’s see something to prove it.

Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act.

Silence in the face of evil is evil itself.

The Church is the Church only when it exists for others.

Death is the supreme festival on the road to freedom.

There is no worse sin than unbelief toward the gospel.

Let him who cannot be alone beware of community. Let him who is not in community beware of being alone.

Only the believing obey, only the obedient believe

The cross is not the terrible end to an otherwise God-fearing and happy life, but it meets us at the beginning of our communion with Christ. When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.

How can God entrust great things to one who will not thankfully receive from Him the little things?

You can only learn what obedience is by obeying

Anyone who thinks that his time is too valuable to spend keeping quiet will eventually have no time for God and his brother, but only for himself and for his own follies.

Only those who obey can believe, and only those who believe can obey.

While it is good that we seek to know the Holy One, it is probably not so good to presume that we ever complete the task.

Help must come from the outside, and it has come and comes daily and answers in the Word of Jesus Christ...

It is the task of youth not to reshape the church, but rather to listen to the word of God.

God does not give us everything we want, but He does fulfill His promises...

Judging others makes us blind, whereas love is illuminating.

It is grace, nothing but grace, that we are allowed to live in community with Christian brethren.

The more genuine and the deeper our community becomes, the more will everything else between us recede, the more clearly and purely will Jesus Christ and His work become the one and only thing that is vital between us.

It is much easier for me to imagine a praying murderer, a praying prostitute, than a vain person praying. Nothing is so at odds with prayer as vanity.

Jesus is the only significance. Beside Jesus nothing has any significance. He alone matters.

The life of discipleship is not the hero-worship we would pay to a good master, but obedience to the Son of God.

Advent creates people, new people.

Desires to which we cling closely can easily prevent us from being what we ought to be and can be; and on the other hand, desires repeatedly mastered for the sake of present duty make us richer.Lack of desire is poverty.

Man seeks, in his manhood, not orders, not laws and peremptory dogmas, but counsel from one who is earnest in goodness and faithful in friendship, making man free.

God has reserved to Himself the right to determine the end of life, because He alone knows the goal to which it is His will to lead it. It is for Him alone to justify a life or to cast it away.

It is the nature of strong people that they can bring out crucial questions and form a clear opinion about them.

After death something new begins, over which all powers of the world of death have no more might.

The church is only the church when it exists for others. To make a start, it should give away all its property to those in need. The clergy must live solely on the free-will offerings of their congregations, or possibly engage in some secular calling. The church must share in the secular problems of ordinary human life, not dominating, but helping and serving. It must tell men of every calling what it means to live in Christ, to exist for others.

Being free means "being free for the other," because the other has bound me to him. Only in relationship with the other am I free

What we are in ourselves, and what we owe to others makes us a complete whole.

The child asks of the Father whom he knows. Thus, the essence of Christian prayer is not general adoration, but definite, concrete petition. The right way to approach God is to stretch out our hands and ask of One who we know has the heart of a Father.

Christian brotherhood is not an ideal which we must realize; it is rather a reality created by God in Christ in which we may participate.

...And then, just when everything is bearing down on us to such an extent that we can scarcely withstand it, the Christmas message comes to tell us that all our ideas are wrong, and that what we take to be evil and dark is really good and light because it comes from God. Our eyes are at fault, that is all.

The disciple simply burns his boats and goes ahead. He is called out... The old life is left behind, and completely surrendered. The disciple is dragged out of his relative security into a life of absolute insecurity... out of the realm of the finite...into the realm of infinite possibilities.

Unless he obeys, a man cannot believe.

Just as our love for God begins with listening to God's Word, the beginning of love for other Christians is learning to listen to them.

The early morning belongs to the Church of the risen Christ. At the break of light it remembers the morning on which death and sin lay prostrate in defeat and new life and salvation were given to mankind

We are separated from one another by an unbridgeable gulf of otherness and strangeness which resists all our attempts to overcome it by means of natural association or emotional or spiritual union. There is no way from one person to another. However loving and sympathetic we try to be, however sound our psychology however frank and open our behaviour we cannot penetrate the incognito of the other man, for there are no direct relationships, not even between soul and soul. Christ stands between us, and we can only get into touch with our neighbors through Him.

What is the "extraordinary"? It is the love of Jesus Christ himself, love that goes to the cross in suffering obedience.

The followers of Christ have been called to peace. . . . And they must not only have peace but make it. And to that end they renounce all violence and tumult. In the cause of Christ nothing is to be gained by such methods . . . . His disciples keep the peace by choosing to endure suffering themselves rather than inflict it on others. They maintain fellowship where others would break it off. They renounce hatred and wrong. In so doing they overcome evil with good, and establish the peace of God in the midst of a world of war and hate.

Only those who put tomorrow completely into God's hand and receive fully today what they need for their lives are really secure.

There are only two places where the powerful and great in this world lose their courage, tremble in the depths of their souls, and become truly afraid. These are the manger and the cross of Jesus Christ....No priest, no theologian stood at the cradle of Bethlehem. And yet, all Christian theology finds its beginnings in the miracle of miracles, that God became human.

Prayer does not mean simply to pour out one's heart. It means rather to find the way to God and to speak with him, whether the heart is full or empty.

Disciples will not be weakened by suffering, worn down, and embittered until they are broken. Instead, they bear suffering, by the power of him who supports them. The disciples bear the suffering laid on them only by the power of him who bears all suffering on the cross. As bearers of suffering, they stand in communion with the Crucified.

To be sure, God shall call you, and us, only at the hour that God has chosen. Until that hour, which lies in God's hand alone, we shall be protected even in the greatest danger; and from our gratitude for such protection ever new readiness surely arises for the final call

Death reveals that the world is not as it should be but that it stands in need of redemption. Christ alone is the conquering of death.

To deny oneself is to be aware only of Christ and no more of self, to see only Him who goes before and no more the road which is too hard for us. Once more, all that self-denial can say is, 'He leads the way, keep close to Him.'

Christianity without the living Christ is inevitably Christianity without discipleship, and Christianity without discipleship is always Christianity without Christ.

Only the suffering God can help.

God is not a God of the emotions but the God of truth.

There is no way to peace along the way of safety. For peace must be dared. It is itself the great venture and can never be safe. Peace is the opposite of security. To demand guarantees is to want to protect oneself. Peace means giving oneself completely to God's commandment. Wanting no security, but in faith and obedience laying the destiny of the nations in the hand of almighty God. Not trying to direct it for selfish purposes. Battles are won not with weapons, but with God. They are won when the way leads to the cross.

Cheap grace is the grace we bestow on ourselves. Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, Communion without confession.... Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate.

Every wedding must be an occasion of joy that human beings can do such great things, that they have been given such immense freedom and power to take the helm in their life’s journey…

In Jesus, the service of God and the service of the least of the brethren were one.

It is not that God's help and presence must still be proved in our life; rather God's presence and help have been demonstrated for us in the life of Jesus Christ. It is in fact more important for us to know what God did to Israel, in God's Son Jesus Christ, than to discover what God intends for us today. The fact that Jesus Christ died is more important than the fact that I will die. And the fact that Jesus Christ was raised from the dead is the sole ground of my hope that I, too, will be raised on the day of judgment

While we exert ourselves to grow beyond our humanity, to leave the human behind us, God becomes human; and we must recognize that God wills that we be human, real human beings. While we distinguish between pious and godless, good and evil, noble and base, God loves real people without distinction.

Every word of Holy Scripture was a love letter from God directed very personally to us and he asked us whether we loved Jesus.

A Christian is someone who shares the sufferings of God in the world.

The best-informed man is not necessarily the wisest. Indeed there is a danger that precisely in the multiplicity of his knowledge he will lose sight of what is essential. But on the other hand, knowledge of an apparently trivial detail quite often makes it possible to see into the depth of things. And so the wise man will seek to acquire the best possible knowledge about events, but always without becoming dependent upon this knowledge. To recognize the significant in the factual is wisdom.

Music... will help dissolve your perplexities and purify your character and sensibilities, and in time of care and sorrow, will keep a fountain of joy alive in you.

The first call which every Christian experiences is the call to abandon the attachments of this world.

Nothing can fill the gap when we are away from those we love, and it would be wrong to try to find anything.....It is nonsense to say that God fills the gap; he does not fill it, but keeps it empty so that our communion with another may be kept alive, even at the cost of pain.

A love that left people alone in their guilt would not have real people as its object. So, in vicarious responsibility for people, and in His love for real human beings, Jesus becomes the one burdened by guilt.

Christianity means community through Jesus Christ and in Jesus Christ. No Christian community is more or less than this.

If you reject God's commanding word, you will not receive God's gracious word.

The Incarnation is the ultimate reason why the service of God cannot be divorced from the service of man.