Top 500 Dietrich Bonhoeffer Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “When a preacher opens the Bible and interprets the word of God, a mystery takes place, a miracle: the grace of God, who comes down from heaven into our midst and speaks to us, knocks on our door, asks questions, warns us, puts pressure on us, alarms us, threatens us, and makes us joyful again and free and sure.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

252. “Come now, solemnest feast on the road to eternal freedom, Death, and destroy those fetters that bow, those walls that imprison this our transient life, these souls that linger in darkness, so that at last we see what is here withheld from our vision. Long did we seek you, freedom, in discipline, action and suffering. Now that we die, in the face of God himself we behold you.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

253. “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.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

254. “A pastor should never complain about his congregation, certainly never to other people, but also not to God. A congregation has not been entrusted to him in order that he should become its accuser before God and men.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

255. “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.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

256. “And so the unseen Lord of the eternal kingdom and of the church sends out ambassadors into this world, giving them a mission that is greater than that of any other, just as heaven is greater than earth, and eternity is greater than time. And the authority that this Lord gives these ambassadors is that much greater than all the authorities in this world.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

257. “The justification of my life before God is to live because of and toward the living, dying, and rising of Jesus Christ.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

258. “The limitation of the ethical phenomenon to its place and time does not imply its rejection but, on the contrary, its validation. One does not use canons to shoot sparrows.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

259. “The fact that we do not speak it but sing it only expresses the fact that our spoken words are inadequate to express what we want to say, that the burden of our song goes far beyond all human words.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

260. “To those who recognize in Jesus the wonder of the Son of God, every one of his words and deeds becomes a wonder; they find in him the last, most profound, most helpful counsel for all needs and questions. Yes, before the child can open his lips, he is full of wonder and full of counsel. Go to the child in the manger. Believe him to be the Son of God, and you will find in him wonder upon wonder, counsel upon counsel.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

261. “Human love is directed to the other person for his own sake, spiritual love loves him for Christ’s sake.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

262. “There is not a place to which the Christian can withdraw from the world, whether it be outwardly or in the sphere of the inner life. Any attempt to escape from the world must sooner or later be paid for with a sinful surrender to the world.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

263. “Time is the most precious gift in our possession, for it is the most irrevocable.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

264. “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. We have one another only through Christ, but through Christ we do have one another, wholly, and for all eternity.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

265. “I am sure of God’s hand and guidance... You must never doubt that I am thankful and glad to go the way which I am being led. My past life is abundantly full of God’s mercy and, above all sin, stands the forgiving love of the Crucified.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

266. “Is it not a miracle that where Jesus has really become Lord over people, peace reigns?”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

267. “No, God and the world, God and its goods are incompatible, because the world and its goods make a bid for our hearts, and only when they have won them do they become what they really are. That is how they thrive, and that is why they are incompatible with allegiance to God. Our hearts have room only for one all-embracing devotion, and we can only cleave to one Lord.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

268. “In the world God wills work, marriage, government, and church, and God wills all these, each in its own way, through Christ, toward Christ, and in Christ. God has placed human beings under all these mandates, not only each individual under one or the other, but all people under all four. There can be no retreat, therefore, from a “worldly” into a “spiritual” “realm.” The practice of the Christian life can be learned only under these four mandates of God.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

269. “Nothing that we despise in other men is inherently absent from ourselves. We must learn to regard people less in the light of what they do or don’t do, and more in light of what they suffer.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

270. “We should never argue with the devil about our sins, but we should speak about our sins only with Jesus.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

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

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

272. “As far as infant baptism is concerned, it must be insisted that the sacrament should be administered only where there is a firm faith present which remembers Christ’s deed of salvation wrought for us once and for all. That can only happen in a living Christian community. To baptize infants without a Church is not only an abuse of the sacrament, it betokens a disgusting frivolity in dealing with the souls of the children themselves. For baptism can never be repeated.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

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

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

274. “Jesus goes on before to Jerusalem and to the cross, and they are filled with fear and amazement at the road he calls them to follow.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

275. “Cheap grace is not the kind of forgiveness of sin which frees us from the toils of sin. Cheap grace is the grace we bestow on ourselves.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

276. “If we have learned to be silent before the Word, we will also learn to manage our silence and our speech during the day.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

277. “There is a wrong way of staying in the world and a wrong way of fleeing from it. In both cases we are fashioning ourselves according to the world.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

278. “The first moments of the new day are not the time for our own plans and worries, not even for our zeal to accomplish our own work, but for God’s liberating grace, God’s sanctifying presence.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

279. “We have to learn that personal suffering is a more effective key, a more rewarding principle for exploring the world in thought and action than personal good fortune.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

280. “Self-centered love loves the other for the sake of itself; spiritual love loves the other for the sake of Christ.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

281. “Where is love more glorified than where she dwells in the midst of her enemies?”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

282. “Holy Scripture is more than a watchword. It is also more than ‘light for today’. It is God’s revealed Word for all men, for all times. Holy Scripture does not consist of individual passages; it is a unit and is intended to be used as such.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

283. “It seems to me more important actually to share someones distress than to use smooth words about it.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

284. “Sanctification means that the Christians have been judged already, and that they are being preserved until the coming of Christ and are ever advancing towards it.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

285. “Genuine love is always self-forgetful in the true sense of the word.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

286. “It is a dangerous error, surely very widespread among Christians, to think that the heart can pray by itself.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

287. “Only because the message concerning Jesus Christ must still go forth and find believers, and because our task is not yet perfected, does God in His patience continue to sustain us with His good gifts.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

288. “It is a costly because it costs a man his life, and it is grace because it gives a man the only true life.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

289. “Prayer means nothing else but the readiness to appropriate the Word, and what is more, to let it speak to me in my personal situation, in my particular tasks, decisions, sins, and temptations.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

290. “The moment we begin to feel satisfied that we are making some progress along the road of sanctification, it is all the more necessary to repent and confess that all our righteousnesses are as filthy rags. Yet the Christian life is not one of gloom, but of ever increasing joy in the Lord. God alone knows our good works; all we know is His good work.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

291. “All are called to be what in the reality of God they already are.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

292. “It is wrong, in this age of necessary decisions, to bully people into decisions that are neither genuine nor necessary.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

293. “I believe that God can and will bring good out of evil, even out of the greatest evil. For that purpose he needs men who make the best use of everything. I believe that God will give us all the strength we need to help us to resist in all times of distress. But he never gives it in advance, lest we should rely on ourselves and not on him alone. A faith such as this should allay all our fears for the future.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

294. “When you read the Bible, you must think that here and now, God is speaking with me.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

295. “The Christ in his own heart is weaker than the Christ in the word of his brother; his own heart is uncertain, his brother’s is sure.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

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

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

297. “Christian marriage is marked by discipline and self-denial. Christ is the Lord even of marriage.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

298. “Most people have forgotten nowadays what a house can mean, though some of us have come to realize it as never before. It is a kingdom of its own in the midst of the world, a stronghold amid life’s storms and stresses, a refuge, even a sanctuary.” – Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

299. “Once a man has truly experienced the mercy of God in his life he will henceforth aspire only to serve.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

300. “To reproach in a modern tyranny a people as a whole for failing to revolt is as if one would reproach a prisoner for failing to escape from a heavily guarded prison.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer