Top 500 Dietrich Bonhoeffer Quotes (2023 Update)
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251. “Easter? Our attention falls more on dying than on death. How we deal with dying is more important to us than how we conquer death. Socrates overcame dying; Christ overcame death.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

252. “Who stands fast? Only the man whose final standard is not his reason, his principles, his conscience, his freedom, or his virtue, but who is ready to sacrifice all this when he is called to obedient and responsible action in faith and in exclusive allegiance to God- the responsible man, who tries to make his whole life an answer to the question and call of God. Where are these responsible people?”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

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

— 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. “Having thus become a mindless tool, the stupid person will also be capable of any evil and at the same time incapable of seeing that it is evil. This is where the danger of diabolical misuse lurks, for it is this that can once and for all destroy human beings.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

256. “Man has learned to cope with all questions of importance without recourse to God as a working hypothesis.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

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

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

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

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

259. “The first service that one owes to others in the fellowship consists in listening to them. Just as love to God begins with listening to His Word, so the beginning of love for the brethren is learning to listen to them. It is God’s love for us that He not only gives us His Word but also lends us His ear. So it is His work that we do for our brother and sister when we learn to listen to them.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

260. “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

261. “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

262. “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

263. “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

264. “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

265. “The cross of Christ is the death which we undergo once and for all in our baptism, and it is a death full of grace.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

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

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

267. “Only what is essential must be said.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

268. “As Christ bore and received us as sinners so we in his fellowship may bear and receive sinners into the fellowship of Christ through the forgiving of sins.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

269. “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

270. “The way to misuse our possessions is to use them as an insurance against the morrow. Anxiety is always directed to the morrow, whereas goods are in the strictest sense meant to be used only for to-day.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

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

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

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

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

273. “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

274. “No one can speak of the beginning but the one who was in the beginning. Thus the Bible begins with God’s free affirmation, free acknowledgment, free revelation of himself: In the beginning God created...”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

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

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

276. “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

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

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

278. “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

279. “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

280. “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

281. “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

282. “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

283. “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

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

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

285. “It will always be true that the wisest course for the disciple is... to abide solely by the Word of God in all simplicity.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

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

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

287. “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

288. “Costly grace is the treasure hidden in the field; for the sake of it a man will gladly go and sell all he has. It is the pearl of great price to by which the merchant will sell all his goods.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

289. “Every sermon must contain a certain shot of heresy.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

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

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

291. “Politics are not the task of a Christian.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

292. “There is no kindness more cruel than the kindness which consigns another person to their sin.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

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

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

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

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

295. “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

296. “Whoever does not know the austere blessedness of waiting – that is, of hopefully doing without – will never experience the full blessing of fulfillment.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

297. “Thus this spiritual love will speak to Christ about a brother more than to a brother about Christ.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

298. “But it is part of the discipline of humility that we must not spare our hand where it can perform a service and that we do not assume that our schedule is our own to manage, but allow it it to be arranged by God.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

299. “The richness of God’s Word ought to determine our prayer, not the poverty of our heart.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

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

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer