Top 500 Dietrich Bonhoeffer Quotes (2025 Update)
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301. “We have become so accustomed to the idea of divine love and of God’s coming at Christmas that we no longer feel the shiver of fear that God’s coming should arouse in us. We are indifferent to the message, taking only the pleasant and agreeable out of it and forgetting the serious aspect, that the God of the world draws near to the people of our little earth and lays claim to us.4 Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “The Coming of Jesus in Our Midst.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

302. “Bonhoeffer was firmly and rightly convinced that it is not only a Christian right but a Christian duty towards God to oppose tyranny, that is, a government which is no longer based on natural law and the law of God. For Bonhoeffer this followed from the fact that the Church as a living force in this world entirely depends on her this-sidedness.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

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

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

304. “There is only one church, the church of faith ruled by the word of Jesus Christ alone. This is the true catholic church that has never disappeared and is still concealed in the church of Rome. It is the body of Christ – corpus Christi. It is the true unity of the West.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

305. “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

306. “Wherever there are sinners, the weak, the sorrowful, the poor in the world, that is where God goes.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

307. “It is infinitely easier to suffer in obedience to a human command than to accept suffering as free, responsible men.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

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

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

309. “We cannot approach the manger of the Christ child in the same way we approach the cradle of another child. Rather, when we go to his manger, something happens, and we cannot leave it again unless we have been judged or redeemed. Here we must either collapse or know the mercy of God directed toward us.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

310. “There remains an experience of incomparable value.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

311. “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.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

312. “There is no worse sin than unbelief toward the gospel.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

313. “The right way to requite evil, according to Jesus, is not to resist it. This saying of Christ removes the Church from the sphere of politics and law.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

314. “God alone judges, and God’s judgment is helpful and healing. After all, we can only serve other Christians; we can never place ourselves above them.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

315. “God’s truth judges created things out of love, and Satan’s truth judges them out of envy and hatred.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

316. “Neighbourliness is not a quality in other people, it is simply their claim on ourselves.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

317. “Jesus himself had called and chosen Judas! That is the real mystery, for Jesus knew from the beginning who would betray him.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

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

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

319. “Principles are only tools in the hands of God; they will soon be thrown away when they are no longer useful.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

320. “The church must share in the secular problems of ordinary human life, not dominating, but helping and serving.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

321. “Every Christian must be fully Christian by bringing God into his whole life, not merely into some spiritual realm.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

322. “No one knows God unless God reveals Himself to him.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

323. “Why do I meditate? Because I am a Christian. Therefore, every day in which I do not penetrate more deeply into the knowledge of God’s Word in Holy Scripture is a lost day for me. I can only move forward with certainty upon the firm ground of the Word of God. And, as a Christian, I learn to know the Holy Scripture in no other way than by hearing the Word preached and by prayerful meditation.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

324. “Are you afraid of God’s wrath? Then go to the child in the manger and receive there the peace of God.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

325. “If we do not give thanks daily for the Christian community in which we have been placed, even when there are no great experiences, no noticeable riches, but much weakness, difficulty, and little faith – and if, on the contrary, we only keep complaining to God that everything is so miserable and so insignificant and does not at all live up to our expectations – then we hinder God from letting our community grow according to the measure and riches that are there for us all in Jesus Christ.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

326. “Only he who gives thanks for little things receives the big things. We prevent God from giving us the great spiritual gifts he has in store for us, because we do not give thanks for daily gifts.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

327. “Ascension joy – inwardly we must become very quiet to hear the soft sound of this phrase at all. Joy lives in its quietness and incomprehensibility. This joy is in fact incomprehensible, for the comprehensible never makes for joy.1 Dietrich Bonhoeffer.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

328. “Suffering means being cut off from God. Therefore those who live in communion with him cannot really suffer.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

329. “Monasticism had transformed the humble work of discipleship into the meritorious activity of the saints, and the self-renunciation of discipleship into the flagrant spiritual self-assertion of the “religious.” The world had crept into the very heart of the monastic life, and was once more making havoc. The monk’s attempt to flee from the world turned out to be a subtle form of love for the world.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

330. “What we shall need is not geniuses, or cynics, or misanthropes, or clever tacticians, but plain, honest, straghtforward men.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

331. “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.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

332. “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

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

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

334. “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

335. “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

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

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

337. “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

338. “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

339. “Every call of Christ leads into death.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

340. “Only those who in following Christ leave everything they have can stand and say that they are justified solely by grace. They recognize the call to discipleship itself as grace and grace as that call. But those who want to use this grace to excuse themselves from discipleship are deceiving themselves.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

341. “We are not to forget but to overcome. That happens through gratitude. We are not supposed to solve the unsolved puzzle of the past and fall into tortuous brooding, but to let even the incomprehensible stand and return it peacefully to God’s hand. This happens through humility. “He has done everything well.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

342. “All that matters is whether one opts for Christ – not Christian opinions.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

343. “God is not free from human beings but for them.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

344. “In short, it is much easier to see a thing through from the point of view of abstract principle than from that of concrete responsibility.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

345. “God is never in the world in any way except in his absolute transcendence of it.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

346. “But because Jesus is the Christ, it has to be made clear from the beginning that his word is not a doctrine. Instead, it creates existence anew.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

347. “God does not exercise an alien domination of the world but a liberating lordship that sets creation free; God’s rule lets family, culture, government, and church fulfill their created purposes, both distinct from and related to one another, and without any usurped heteronomy of one over the other.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

348. “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

349. “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

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

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer