Top 500 Dietrich Bonhoeffer Quotes (2023 Update)
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401. “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

402. “Those who seek their own honor are no longer seeking God and their neighbor.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

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

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

404. “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

405. “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

406. “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

407. “Be glad. Celebrate! Lose your mindless fear, and take courage today. No, don’t ever be afraid, no matter what’s happened to you before. That’s right, don’t be afraid, no matter what you may see coming. Take courage because Christ was crucified for you.”2 Catherine of Siena, Letters.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

408. “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

409. “Total war uses every conceivable means toward the end of national self-preservation. Everything is right and permitted that serves the cause of one’s own people.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

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

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

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

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

412. “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

413. “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

414. “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

415. “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

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

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

417. “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

418. “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

419. “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

420. “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

421. “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

422. “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

423. “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

424. “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

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

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

426. “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

427. “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

428. “As far as infant baptism is concerned, it must be insisted that the sacrament should be administered only where there is a firm faith present which remembers Christ’s deed of salvation wrought for us once and for all. That can only happen in a living Christian community. To baptize infants without a Church is not only an abuse of the sacrament, it betokens a disgusting frivolity in dealing with the souls of the children themselves. For baptism can never be repeated.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

429. “Cheap grace is not the kind of forgiveness of sin which frees us from the toils of sin. Cheap grace is the grace we bestow on ourselves.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

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

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

431. “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

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

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

433. “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

434. “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

435. “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

436. “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

437. “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

438. “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

439. “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

440. “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

441. “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

442. “The believer need not feel any shame when yearning for the physical presence of other Christians, as if one were still living too much in the flesh. A human being is created as a body; the Son of God appeared on earth in the body for our sake and was raised in the body.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

443. “Cheap grace is the mortal enemy of the church.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

444. “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

445. “A shaking of heads, perhaps even an evil laugh, must go through our old, smart, experienced, self-assured world, when it hears the call of salvation of believing Christians: “For a child has been born for us, a son given to us.”5 Dietrich Bonhoeffer.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

446. “Through the life and death of Jesus Christ, history becomes not the transient bearer of eternal values but, for the first time, thoroughly temporal.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

447. “The whole of the past is embraced by the word “forgiveness”; the whole of the future is preserved in the faithfulness of God.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

448. “Jesus is Lord of the ages and is always with his own, even when things are difficult, and will abide with us; that is our comfort. If tribulation and anxiety come upon us, Jesus is with us and leads us over into God’s eternal kingdom.”

— 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. “The fearful danger of the present time is that above the cry for authority, we forget that man stands alone before the ultimate authority, and that anyone who lays violent hands on man here, is infringing eternal laws, and taking upon himself superhuman authority, which will eventually crush him.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer