Top 500 Dietrich Bonhoeffer Quotes (2024 Update)
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401. “Desires repeatedly mastered for the sake of present duty make us richer. Lack of desire is poverty.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

402. “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

403. “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

404. “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

405. “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

406. “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

407. “The cross is not the suffering tied to being natural existence, but the suffering tied to being Christians. The cross is never simply a matter of suffering, but a matter of suffering and rejection, and even, strictly speaking, rejection for the sake of Jesus Christ, not for the sake of some other arbitrary behavior or confession.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

408. “That it is Peter, the rock of the church, who incurs guilt here immediately after his own confession to Jesus Christ and after his appointment by Jesus, means that from its very inception the church itself has taken offense at the suffering Christ.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

409. “Ethics as formation, then, is the venture of speaking about the form of Christ taking form in our world neither abstractly nor casuistically, neither programmatically nor purely reflectively.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

410. “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

411. “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

412. “Nothing is so at odds with prayer as vanity.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

413. “We are torn out of our own existence and set down in the midst of the holy history of God on earth. There God dealt with us, and there he still deals with us, our needs and our sins, in judgment and grace.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

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

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

415. “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

416. “Work is only an instrument in the hand of God for the purification of Christians from all self-centeredness and self-seeking. The work of the world can be done only where a person forgets himself, where he loses himself in a cause...”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

417. “It is in this light that the good works of the disciples are meant to be seen. Men are not to see the disciples but their good works, says Jesus. And these works are none other than those which the Lord Jesus himself has created in them by calling them to be the light of the world under the shadow of his cross.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

418. “The more I begin to love the commandments of God in creation and word, the more present they will be for me in every hour.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

419. “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

420. “No one can say yes to God’s ways who has said no to his promises and commandments. Acceptance of the will of God comes in the daily submission under his Word.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

421. “We should find God in what we do know, not in what we don’t; not in outstanding problems, but in those we have already solved.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

422. “A king who dies on the cross must be the king of a rather strange kingdom. Only those who understand the profound paradox of the cross can also understand the whole meaning of Jesus’ assertion: my kingdom is not of this world. 2 Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “Lectures to the Congregation in Barcelona.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

423. “Before the heart unlocks itself for the world, God wants to open it for himself; before the ear takes in the countless voices of the day, it should hear in the early hours the voice of the Creator and Redeemer. God prepared the stillness of the first morning for himself. It should remain his.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

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

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

425. “It is God’s earth out of which man is taken. From it he has his body. His body belongs to his essential being. Man’s body is not his prison, his shell his exterior, but man himself. Man does not “have” a body; he does not “have” a soul; rather he “is” body and soul. Man in the beginning is really his body. He is one. He is his body, as Christ is completely his body, as the Church is the body of Christ.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

426. “The awareness of a spiritual tradition that reaches through the centuries gives one a certain feeling of security in the face of all transitory difficulties.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

427. “Holy theology arises from knees bent before the mystery of the divine child in the stable. Without the holy night, there is no theology.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

428. “With their ever-available loving hearts, they bow before God and bend down under all this pain and are lower than all the other creatures on earth. Pride is rare among them.3 Mechthild of Magdeburg, “The Flowing Light of the Godhead.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

429. “The God of Jesus Christ has nothing to do with what God, as we imagine him, could do and ought to do. If we are to learn what God promises, and what he fulfils, we must persevere in quiet meditation on the life, sayings, deeds, sufferings, and death of Jesus.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

430. “In the New Testament our enemies are those who harbor hostility against us, not those against whom we cherish hostility, for Jesus refuses to reckon with such a possibility.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

431. “In Jesus, the service of God and the service of the least of the brethren were one.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

432. “The temptation of Christ was harder, unspeakably harder, than the temptation of Adam; for Adam carried nothing in himself which could have given the tempter a claim and power over him. But Christ bore in himself the whole burden of the flesh, under the curse, under condemnation; and yet his temptation was henceforth to bring help and salvation to all flesh.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

433. “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

434. “But discipleship never consists in this or that specific action: it is always a decision, either for or against Jesus Christ... Christ speaks to us exactly as he spoke to them. It was not as though they first recognized him as the Christ and then received his command. They believed his word and command and recognized him as the Christ – in that order.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

435. “The gospel is not to take the form of hole-in-the-corner sectarianism, it must be set forth by public preaching.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

436. “You are disobedient, you are trying to keep some part of your life under your own control. That is what is preventing you from listening to Christ and believing in his grace. You cannot hear Christ because you are willfully disobedient. Somewhere in your heart you are refusing to listen to his call. Your difficult is your sins.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

437. “Ratio became a working hypothesis, a heuristic principle, and thus led to the incomparable rise of technology. This was something fundamentally new in world history. From the Egyptian pyramids to the Greek temples, from the medieval cathedrals up to the eighteenth century, technology was a matter of handicraft. It served religion, royalty, culture, and people’s daily needs.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

438. “Since the appearance of Christ, ethics can be concerned with only one thing: to partake in the reality of the fulfilled will of God.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

439. “Only those who place tomorrow in God’s hands and receive what they need to live today are truly secure. Receiving daily liberates us from tomorrow. Thought for tomorrow delivers us up to endless worry.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

440. “There is always a danger that in our asceticism we shall be tempted to imitate the sufferings of Christ. This is a pious but godless ambition, for beneath it there always lurks the notion that it is possible for us to step into Christ’s shoes and suffer as he did and kill the old Adam. We are then presuming to undertake that bitter work of eternal redemption which Christ himself wrought for us. The motive of asceticism was more limited – to equip us for better service and deeper humiliation.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

441. “The Christian community is not a spiritual sanatorium. Those who take refuge in community while fleeing from themselves are misusing it to indulge in empty talk and distraction, no matter how spiritual this idle talk and distraction may appear.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

442. “Self-denial means knowing only Christ, no longer knowing oneself. It means no longer seeing oneself, only him who is going ahead, no longer seeing the way which is too difficult for us. Self-denial says only: he is going ahead; hold fast to him.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

443. “In the gospels the very first step a man must take is an act which radically affects his whole existence.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

444. “The cross always simultaneously means rejection, and that the disgrace of suffering is part of the cross. Being expelled, despised, and abandoned by people in one’s suffering is part of the cross. Being expelled, despised, and abandoned by people in one’s suffering, as we find in the unending lament of the psalmist, is an essential feature of the suffering of the cross, yet one no longer comprehensible to a form of Christian life unable to distinguish between bourgeois and Christian existence.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

445. “In such a Church the world finds a cheap covering for its sins; no contrition is required, still less any real desire to be delivered from sin.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

446. “What we are in ourselves, and what we owe to others makes us a complete whole.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

447. “It is precisely when a person, who is borne down by inner emptiness and weariness or a sense of personal unworthiness, feels that he would like to withdraw from his task, that he should learn what it means to have a duty to perform in the fellowship, and.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

448. “Only when I forgo visible proof, do I believe in God.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

449. “I think that even in this place we ought to live as if we had no wishes and no future, and just be our true selves.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

450. “Cheap grace therefore amounts to a denial of the living Word of God, in fact, a denial of the Incarnation of the Word of God. Cheap.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer