Top 500 Dietrich Bonhoeffer Quotes (2023 Update)
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351. “Had Levi stayed at his post, Jesus might have been his present help in trouble, but not the Lord of his whole life. In other words Levi would never have learnt to believe.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

352. “If we do not give thanks daily for the Christian fellowship in which we have been placed, even where there is no great experience, no discoverable riches, but much weakness, small faith, and difficulty; if, on the contrary, we only keep complaining to God that everything is so paltry and petty, so far from what we expected, then we hinder God from letting our fellowship grow according to the measure and riches which are there for us all in Jesus Christ.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

353. “Yet neither father nor mother, neither wife nor child, neither nationality nor tradition, can protect a man at the moment of his call. It is Christ’s will that he should be thus isolated, and that he should fix his eyes solely upon him.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

354. “One doesn’t cling anxiously to life, but neither does one throw it lightly away. One is content with measured time and does not attribute eternity to earthly things. One leaves to death the limited right that it still has. But one expects the new human being and the new world only frombeyond death, from the power that has conquered death.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

355. “They believe that a good intention already means a new beginning; they believe that on their own they can make a new start whenever they want. But that is an evil illusion: only God can make a new beginning with people whenever God pleases, but not people with God.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

356. “The more thankfully we daily receive what is given to us, the more assuredly and consistently will community increase and grow from day to day as God pleases.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

357. “Nietzsche could have arisen only from the soil of the German Reformation. Here, the contradiction between the natural and grace is starkly opposed to the reconciliation of nature with grace in the Roman heritage.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

358. “There is no fulfilment of the law apart from communion with God, and no communion with God apart from fulfilment of the law.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

359. “In religion, as in art and science, there are – in addition to times of great excitement – times of sober work and practice. Interaction with God must be practiced; otherwise we will not find the right tone, the right word, the right language, when he surprises us. We must learn God’s language, laboriously learn it. And we must work at it, so that we will be able to talk with him.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

360. “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.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

361. “We can of course shake off the burden which is laid upon us, but only find that we have a still heavier burden to carry – a yoke of our own choosing, the yoke of our self.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

362. “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

363. “I have never seen the swing from “Hosanna!” to “Crucify!” more graphically evoked than in the virtually insane way the crowd goes berserk when the toreador makes an adroit turn, and they immediately follow this with insane howling and whistling when some mishap occurs. The momentary character of this mass mood goes so far that they applaud for the bull and against the toreador if, for example, the latter proves to be cowardly and – quite understandably – his courage fails him for a moment.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

364. “So the call to discipleship is a commitment solely to the person of Jesus Christ, a breaking through of all legalisms by the grace of him who calls.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

365. “How could one person pray the prayer of the community without being held up and supported in prayer by the community itself? At precisely this point every word of criticism must be transformed into more faithful intercession and mutual help. How easily a community can split apart if this is not done!”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

366. “Struggling against the legalism of simple obedience, we end by setting up the most dangerous law of all, the law of the world and the law of grace. In our effort to combat legalism we land ourselves in the worst kind of legalism. The only way of overcoming this legalism is by real obedience to Christ when he calls us to follow him; for in Jesus the law is at once fulfilled and cancelled.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

367. “Desires repeatedly mastered for the sake of present duty make us richer. Lack of desire is poverty.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

368. “To bear the burden of the other person means involvement with the created reality of the other, to accept and affirm it, and, in bearing with it, to break through to the point where we take joy ink.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

369. “Jesus does not enjoin his disciples to marry, but he does sanctify marriage according to the law by affirming its indissolubility and by prohibiting the innocent party from remarrying when the guilty partner has broken the marriage by adultery.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

370. “Therefore, let those who until now have had the privilege of living a Christian life together with other Christians praise God’s grace from the bottom of their hearts. Let them thank God on their knees and realize: it is grace, nothing but grace, that we are still permitted to live in the community of Christians today.32.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

371. “We are certainly not Christ; we are not called on to redeem the world by our own deeds and sufferings, and we need not try to assume such an impossible burden. We are not lords, but instruments in the hand of the Lord of history; and we can share in other people’s sufferings only to a very limited degree.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

372. “Since God, however, as ultimate reality is no other than the self-announcing, self-witnessing, self-revealing God in Jesus Christ, the question of good can only find its answer in Christ.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

373. “The real trouble is that the pure Word of Jesus has been overlaid with so much human ballast – burdensome rules and regulations, false hopes and consolations – that it has become extremely difficult to make a genuine decision for Christ.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

374. “Whoever despises another human being will never be able to make anything of him. Nothing of what we despise in another is itself foreign to us.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

375. “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

376. “Nothing can be more cruel than that leniency which abandons others to their sin.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

377. “With the birth of Jesus, the great kingdom of peace has begun.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

378. “There is also a false serenity that is not at all Christian. We need feel no shame as Christians about a measure of impatience, longing, protest against what is unnatural, and a strong measure of desire for freedom and earthly happiness and the capacity to effect change. In.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

379. “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

380. “The church can only defend its own space by fighting, not for space, but for the salvation of the world. Otherwise the church becomes a “religious society” that fights in its own interest and thus has ceased to be the church of God in the world.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

381. “It is the wonderful theme of the Bible, so frightening for many people, that the only visible sign of God in the world is the cross.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

382. “The attempt to understand reality apart from that action of God in and upon reality means living in anabstraction; it means failing to live in reality and vacillating between the extremes of a servile attitude toward the status quo and a protest in principle against it. Only God’s becoming human makes possible an action that is genuinely in accord with reality. The world remains world. But it only does so because God has taken care of it and declared it to be under God’s rule.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

383. “Events cast their shadows ahead; before a harsh winter, wild animals grow thicker fur, and the beaver puts on a thicker layer of fat. What kind of times and what sort of tasks can lie ahead for a generation that must think so harshly, even at such a young age, in order to survive?”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

384. “And if we ask how are we to know where our hearts are, the answer is just as simple – everything which hinders us from loving God above all things and acts as a barrier between ourselves and our obedience to Jesus is our treasure, and the place where our heart is.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

385. “The Kingdom is to be in the midst of your enemies.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

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

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

387. “The consciousness of being borne up by a spiritual tradition that goes back for centuries gives one a feeling of confidence and security in the face of all passing strains and stresses.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

388. “This makes it clear that intercession is also a daily service we owe to God and our brother. He who denies his neighbour the service of praying for him denies him the service of a Christian. It is clear, furthermore, that intercession is not general and vague but very concrete: a matter of definite persons and definite difficulties and therefore of definite petitions. The more definite my intercession becomes, the more promising it is.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

389. “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.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

390. “But when we create our own God and our own world, what we are really doing is to deify our own lust. We are then bound to hate our fellow-men, as obstacles standing in the way of our wills.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

391. “With that we have articulated a basic criticism of the most grandiose of all human attempts to advance toward the divine – by way of the church. Christianity conceals within itself a germ hostile to the church. It is far too easy for us to base our claims to God on our own Christian religiosity and our church commitment, and in so doing utterly to misunderstand and distort the Christian idea.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

392. “No sacrifice which a lover would make for his beloved is too great for us to make for our enemy.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

393. “Those sentimental radio hits, with their artificial naivete and empty crudities, are the pitiful remains and the maximum that people will tolerate by way of mental effort; it’s a ghastly desolation and impoverishmment. By contrast, we can be very glad when something affects us deeply, and regard the accompanying pains as an enrichment.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

394. “Just as Christians should not be constantly feeling the pulse of their spiritual life, so too the Christian community has not been given to us by God for us to be continually taking its temperature. The more thankfully we daily receive what is given to us, the more assuredly and consistently will community increase and grow from day to day as God pleases.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

395. “Only he who gives thanks for the little things receives the big things.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

396. “The fact that the stupid person is often stubborn must not blind us to the fact that he is not independent. In conversation with him, one virtually feels that one is dealing not at all with him as a person, but with slogans, catchwords, and the like that have taken possession of him. He is under a spell, blinded, misused, and abused in his very being.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

397. “Human beings have freedom toward death and the right to death, in the sense of sacrifice, but only when the good sought through sacrifice, and not the destruction of one’s own life, is the reason for risking one’s life.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

398. “You are called into the community of faith; the call was not meant for you alone. You carry your cross, you struggle, and you pray in the community of faith, the community of those who are called.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

399. “Once again I’ve taken up the readings and meditated on them. The key to everything is the ‘in him’. All that we may rightly expect from God, and ask him for, is to be found in Jesus Christ. The God of Jesus Christ has nothing to do with what God, as we imagine him, could do and ought to do.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

400. “How would you expect to find community while you intentionally withdraw from it at some point? The disobedient cannot believe; only the obedient believe.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer