Top 500 Dietrich Bonhoeffer Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 9 of 10

401. “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

402. “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

403. “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

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

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

405. “Unless he obeys, a man cannot believe.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

406. “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

407. “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

408. “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

409. “The source of a Christian ethic is not the reality of one’s own self, not the reality of the world, nor is it the reality of norms and values. It is the reality of God that is revealed in Jesus Christ.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

410. “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

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

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

412. “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

413. “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

414. “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

415. “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

416. “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

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

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

418. “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

419. “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

420. “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

421. “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

422. “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

423. “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

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

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

425. “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

426. “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

427. “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

428. “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

429. “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

430. “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

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

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

432. “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

433. “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

434. “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

435. “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

436. “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

437. “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

438. “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

439. “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

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

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

441. “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

442. “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

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

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

444. “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

445. “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

446. “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

447. “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

448. “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

449. “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

450. “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