Dietrich Bonhoeffer quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Dietrich Bonhoeffer Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Dietrich Bonhoeffer on Wise Famous Quotes.

When our will wholeheartedly enters into the prayer of Christ, then we pray correctly.

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

God does not give us everything we want, but He does fulfill His promises ...

It is worse for a liar to tell the truth than for a lover of truth to lie.

As long as we let the Word of God be our only armor, we can look confidently into the future.

A pastor who does not pray daily for his congregation is not a pastor.

To be conformed to the one who has become human - that is what being really human means.[77.]

Just as our love for God begins with listening to God's Word, the beginning of love for other Christians is learning to listen to them.

The test of the morality of a society is what it does for its children.

After death something new begins, over which all powers of the world of death have no more might.

I can no longer condemn or hate a brother for whom I pray, no matter how much trouble he causes me.

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

Every sermon must contain a certain shot of heresy.

God does not love some ideal person, but rather human beings just as we are, not some ideal world, but rather the real world.

Faith is only real when there is obedience, never without it, and faith only becomes faith in the act of obedience.

Why does the Old Testament law never punish anyone by depriving him of his freedom?

Whenever the Psalter is abandoned, an incomparable treasure is lost to the Christian church. With its recovery will come unexpected power.

Time is the most precious gift in our possession, for it is the most irrevocable.

Jesus Christ has to suffer and be rejected ... Suffering and being rejected are not the same.

[Christ] is the Mediator, not only between God and man, but between man and man, between man and reality.

Every word of Holy Scripture was a love letter from God directed very personally to us and he asked us whether we loved Jesus.

God has willed that we should seek and find God's living Word in the testimony of other Christians, in the mouths of human beings.

The Lord confers great honor on his servants when he brings them suffering ...

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

No one knows God unless God reveals Himself to him.

Discipleship never consists in this or that specific action: it is always a decision, either for or against Jesus Christ.

Fulfilled life is possible in spite of unfulfilled wishes.

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

Man has learned to cope with all questions of importance without recourse to God as a working hypothesis.

It is the task of youth not to reshape the church, but rather to listen to the word of God.

We must be ready to allow ourselves to be interrupted by God.

Not until one person desires to keep his own bread for himself does hunger ensue.

To deny oneself is to be aware only of Christ and no more of self, to see only him who goes before and no more the road which is too hard for us.

When you read the Bible, you must think that here and now, God is speaking with me

The worse the evil, the readier must the Christian be to suffer it; he must let the evil person fall into Jesus' hands.

A false faith is capable of terrible and monstrous things.

There is meaning in every journey that is unknown to the traveler.

Discipleship is not an offer that man makes to Christ.

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.

We are not to simply bandage the wounds of victims beneath the wheels of injustice, we are to drive a spoke into the wheel itself.

They bear their sorrow in the strength of him who bears them up, who bore the whole suffering of the world upon the cross.

When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.

Every Christian must be fully Christian by bringing God into his whole life, not merely into some spiritual realm.

Joy draws its nourishment from quietness and from the unfathomable.

All that matters is whether one opts for Christ - not Christian opinions.

The richness of God's Word ought to determine our prayer, not the poverty of our heart.

Action springs not from thought, but from a readiness for responsibility.

One's task is not to turn the world upside down, but to do what is necessary at the given place and with a due consideration of reality.

God cleanses and sanctifies us, comes to us with grace and love. God makes us happy, as only children can be happy.

The beginning of love for the brethren is learning to listen to them.

When all is said and done, the life of faith is nothing if not an unending struggle of the spirit with every available weapon against the flesh.

If Jesus Christ is not true God, how could he help us? If he is not true man, how could he help us?

Time lost is time not filled, time left empty.

It seems to me more important actually to share someones distress than to use smooth words about it.

Only where God is can there be a new beginning. We cannot command God to grant it; we can only pray to God for it.

We pray for the big things and forget to give thanks for the ordinary, small (and yet really not small) gifts.

God loves his work and therefore wills to preserve it. Creation and preservation are two aspects of the one activity of God.

Christianity without discipleship is always Christianity without Christ.

The task of pastoral ministry, above all else, is to arrange contingencies for an encounter with the divine.

Your life as a Christian should make non believers question their disbelief in God.

We have been silent witnesses to

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

church must bear witness to Jesus Christ as living lord, and it must do so in a world that has turned away from Christ after knowing him.

May we be enabled to say "No" to sin and "Yes" to the sinner.

It was Dietrich Bonhoeffer who more than anybody else realized that nothing less than a return to the Christian faith could save Germany.

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

It is only when he is a burden that another person is really a brother and not merely an object to be manipulated

Then fear will grow pale and fade away, and you will be free, through your faith in our strong and living Savior, Jesus Christ.

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.

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

For we cannot speak of the beginning; where the beginning begins our thinking stops, it comes to an end.

The ultimate test of a moral society is the kind of world that it leaves to its children.

It is a wicked sophistry to justify the worldliness of the Church by the cross of Christ.

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

The world upon whom grace is thrust as a bargain will grow tired of it.

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

You can only learn what obedience is by obeying

Time is lost when we have not lived a full human life, time unenriched by experience, creative endeavor, enjoyment, and suffering.

If you want my goodness to stay with you then serve your neighbor, for that is where God comes to you.

A Christian is someone who shares the sufferings of God in the world.

Jesus goes on before to Jerusalem and to the cross, and they are filled with fear and amazement at the road he calls them to follow.

Jesus himself did not try to convert the two thieves on the cross; he waited until one of them turned to him.

It is a dangerous error, surely very widespread among Christians, to think that the heart can pray by itself.

The biggest mistake you can make in your life is to be always afraid of making a mistake.

Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate. Costly

Principles are only tools in the hands of God; they will soon be thrown away when they are no longer useful.

Only in Jesus are we able to pray, and with Him we also know that we shall be heard.

We have grown so accustomed to the idea of divine love ... that we no longer sense the awe that God's coming should awaken in us.

One act of obedience is better than one hundred sermons.

The justification of my life before God is to live because of and toward the living, dying, and rising of Jesus Christ.

Authority rests upon his shoulders" (Isa. 9:6).

Contrary to all my own opinions and convictions, Jesus Christ will tell me what love toward the brethren really is.

The church is her true self only when she exists for humanity.

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.

The physical presence of other Christians is a source of incomparable joy and strength to the believer.

Every call of Christ leads into death.

The sermon has been reduced to parenthetical church remarks about newspaper events,

In ordinary life we hardly realize that we receive a great deal more than we give, and that it is only with gratitude that life becomes rich.

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

The deep meaning of the cross of Christ is that there is no suffering on earth that is not borne by God.