Top 500 Dietrich Bonhoeffer Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “In total reality, he comes in the form of the beggar, of the dissolute human child in ragged clothes, asking for help. He confronts you in every person that you meet. As long as there are people, Christ will walk the earth as your neighbor, as the one through whom God calls you, speaks to you, makes demands on you.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

102. “In normal life we hardly realize how much more we receive than we give, and life cannot be rich without such gratitude. It is so easy to overestimate the importance of our own achievements compared with what we owe to the help of others.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

103. “Joy draws its nourishment from quietness and from the unfathomable.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

104. “The beginning of love for the brethren is learning to listen to them.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

105. “Battles are won, not with weapons, but with God. They are won where the way leads to the cross.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

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

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

107. “Sin demands to have a man by himself. It withdraws him from the community. The more isolated a person is the more attractive will be the power of sin over him, and the more deeply he becomes involved in it, the more disastrous is his isolation.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

108. “Christians have forgotten that the ministry of listening has been committed to them by Him who is Himself the great listener and whose work they should share. We should listen with the ears of God that we may speak the Word of God.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

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

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

110. “Intercessory prayer is the purifying bath into which the individual and the community must enter every day.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

111. “Things do exist that are worth standing up for without compromise. To me it seems that peace and social justice are such things, as is Christ himself.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

112. “Jesus himself did not try to convert the two thieves on the cross; he waited until one of them turned to him.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

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

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

114. “It is only because he became like us that we can become like him.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

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

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

116. “Where a people prays, there is the church; and where the church is; there is never loneliness.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

117. “Love asks nothing in return, but seeks those who need it. And who needs our love more than those who are consumed with hatred and are utterly devoid of love.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

118. “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.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

119. “Whenever Christ calls us, His call leads us to death.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

120. “To recognize the significant in the factual is wisdom.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

121. “I believe that nothing that happens to me is meaningless and that it is good for us all that it should be so, even if it runs counter to our own wishes. As I see it, I’m here for some purpose, and I only hope I may fulfill it.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

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

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

123. “God honors some with great suffering and grants them the grace of martyrdom, while other are not tempted beyond their strength. But in every case it is one cross.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

124. “Christian love draws no distinction between one enemy and another, except that the more bitter our enemy’s hatred, the greater his need of love.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

125. “Upon closer observation, it becomes apparent that every strong upsurge of power in the public sphere, be it of a political or a religious nature, infects a large part of humankind with stupidity.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

126. “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.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

127. “Only in Jesus are we able to pray, and with Him we also know that we shall be heard.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

128. “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.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

129. “The preaching of grace can only be protected by the preaching of repentance.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

130. “Death is the supreme festival on the road to freedom.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

131. “Easter is not about immortality but about resurrection from a death that is a real death with all its frightfulness and horrors, resurrection from a death of the body and the soul, of the whole person, resurrection by the power of God’s mighty act. This is the Easter message.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

132. “Christian community is not an ideal we have to realize, but rather a reality created by God in Christ in which we may participate. The more clearly we learn to recognize that the ground and strength and promise of all our community is in Jesus Christ alone, the more calmly we will learn to think about our community and pray and hope for it.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

133. “Our church, which has been fighting in these years only for its self-preservation, as though that were an end in itself, is incapable of taking the word of reconciliation and redemption to mankind and the world.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

134. “Possessions are not God’s blessing and goodness, but the opportunities of service which he entrusts to us.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

135. “The heart clings to collected treasure. Stored-up possessions get between me and God. Where my treasure is, there is my trust, my security, my comfort, my God. Treasure means idolatry.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

136. “The Church does not need brilliant personalities but faithful servants of Jesus and the brethren. Not in the former but in the latter is the lack.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

137. “God has willed that we should seek and find God’s living Word in the testimony of other Christians, in the mouths of human beings.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

138. “The word of cheap grace has been the ruin of more Christians than any commandment of works.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

139. “A Christian fellowship lives and exists by the intercession of its members for one another, or it collapses.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

140. “It is a blessed thing to know that no power on earth, no temptation, no human frailty can dissolve what God holds together.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

141. “Who can really be faithful in great things if he has not learned to be faithful in the things of daily life?”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

142. “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.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

143. “So many people come to church with a genuine desire to hear what we have to say, yet they are always going back home with the uncomfortable feeling that we are making it too difficult for them to come to Jesus.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

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

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

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

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

146. “Destruction of the embryo in the mother’s womb is a violation of the right to live which God has bestowed upon this nascent life.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

147. “Political action means taking on responsibility. This cannot happen without power. Power is to serve responsibility.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

148. “Wherever it pleases God to put man in this world, the Christian must be ready for martyrdom and death. It is only in this way that man learns faith.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

149. “The Church knows nothing of a sacredness of war. The Church which prays’Our Father’asks God only for peace.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

150. “When people are deeply affected by the Word, they tell it to other people.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer