Dietrich Bonhoeffer Quotes

We are silent at the beginning of the day because God should have the first word, and we are silent before going to sleep because the last word also belongs to God.

Joy draws its nourishment from quietness and from the unfathomable.

Time lost is time not filled, time left empty.

There is a wrong way of staying in the world and a wrong way of fleeing from it. In both cases we are fashioning ourselves according to the world.

Only the suffering God can help.

Where God tears great gaps we should not try to fill them with human words.

Every wedding must be an occasion of joy that human beings can do such great things, that they have been given such immense freedom and power to take the helm in their life's journey.

Any honours that come our way are only stolen from him to whom alone they really belong, the Lord who sent us.

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

Advent creates people, new people.

A person who loves community tends to destroy it. But a person who loves people creates community wherever he goes.

God turns toward the very places from which humans turn away.

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

If you set out to seek freedom, then learn above all things to govern your soul and your senses . . . only through discipline may a man learn to be free.

A day without morning and evening prayers and personal intercessions is actually a day without meaning or importance.

Jesus is no draughtsman of political blueprints, he is the one who vanquished evil through suffering. It looked as though evil had triumphed on the cross, but the real victory belonged to Jesus.

It is a blessed thing to know that no power on earth, no temptation, no human frailty can dissolve what God holds together.

Destruction of the embryo in the mother's womb is a violation of the right to live which God has bestowed upon this nascent life.

What is the "extraordinary"? It is the love of Jesus Christ himself, love that goes to the cross in suffering obedience.

How can God entrust great things to one who will not thankfully receive from Him the little things?

Death is the supreme festival on the road to freedom.

And after death something new begins, over which all the powers of the world of death can have no more control.

Christian brotherhood is not an ideal which we must realize; it is rather a reality created by God in Christ in which we may participate.

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

There is no worse sin than unbelief toward the gospel.

the world exercises dominion by force and Christ and Christians conquer by service.

The limitation of the ethical phenomenon to its place and time does not imply its rejection but, on the contrary, its validation. One does not use canons to shoot sparrows.

Not everyone can wait: neither the sated nor the satisfied nor those without respect can wait. The only ones who can wait are people who carry restlessness around with them.

He who fears the face of God does not fear the face of man. He who fears the face of man does not fear the face of God.

The preaching of grace can only be protected by the preaching of repentance.

The best-informed man is not necessarily the wisest. Indeed there is a danger that precisely in the multiplicity of his knowledge he will lose sight of what is essential.

Do not try to make the Bible relevant. Its relevance is axiomatic.

Every Christian community must realize that not only do the weak need the strong, but also that the strong cannot exist without the weak. The elimination of the weak is the death of fellowship.

The church ... is not just to bandage the victims under the wheel, but to put a spoke in the wheel itself.

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

The Church is the Church only when it exists for others.

Man seeks, in his manhood, not orders, not laws and peremptory dogmas, but counsel from one who is earnest in goodness and faithful in friendship, making man free.

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

If you want my goodness to stay with you then serve your neighbour, for in him God comes to you himself; such a man sees in his neighbour the material and spiritual need he is called to meet.

Anyone who thinks that his time is too valuable to spend keeping quiet will eventually have no time for God and his brother, but only for himself and for his own follies.

Love, in the sense of spontaneous, unreflective action, spells the death of the old man.

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

The life of discipleship is not the hero-worship we would pay to a good master, but obedience to the Son of God.

Not hero worship, but intimacy with Christ.

The Christian life is participation in the encounter of Christ with the world.

The first service that one owes to others consists in listening to them.

To recognize the significant in the factual is wisdom.

It is the nature, and the advantage, of strong people that they can raise the crucial questions and form a clear opinion about them.

There is no kindness more cruel than the kindness which consigns another person to their sin.

It is only by living completely in this world that one learns to have faith.