Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a German evangelical pastor, theologian, anti-Nazi dissident, and key founding member of the Confessing Church. His writings on Christianity’s role in the secular world have become widely influential, and his book The Cost of Discipleship has been described as a modern classic. These Dietrich Bonhoeffer Quotes on grace, prayer, suffering will motivate you.
Best Dietrich Bonhoeffer Quotes
- “If I sit next to a madman as he drives a car into a group of innocent bystanders, I can’t, as a Christian, simply wait for the catastrophe, then comfort the wounded and bury the dead. I must try to wrestle the steering wheel out of the hands of the driver.” ~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer
- “Your life as a Christian should make nonbelievers question their disbelief in God.” ~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer
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“Silence in the face of evil is evil itself.” ~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer
- “The person who’s in love with their vision of community will destroy community. But the person who loves the people around them will create community everywhere they go.” ~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer
- “Being a Christan is less about cautiously avoiding sin than about courageously and actively doing God’s will.” ~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer
- “There is nothing that can replace the absence of someone dear to us, and one should not even attempt to do so. One must simply hold out and endure it. At first, that sounds very hard, but at the same time, it is also a great comfort. For to the extent, the emptiness truly remains unfilled one remains connected to the other person through it. It is wrong to say that God fills the emptiness. God in no way fills it but much more leaves it precisely unfilled and thus helps us preserve — even in pain — the authentic relationship.” ~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer
- “Salvation is free, but discipleship will cost you your life” ~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer
- “Cheap grace is the grace we bestow on ourselves. Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, Communion without confession… Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living, and incarnate.” ~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer
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“Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act.” ~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer
- “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. To raise the question whether we are here concerned already with a human being or not is merely to confuse the issue. The simple fact is that God certainly intended to create a human being and that this nascent human being has been deliberately deprived of his life. And that is nothing but murder.” ~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer
- “We must be ready to allow ourselves to be interrupted by God, who will thwart our plans and frustrate our ways time and again, even daily, by sending people across our path with their demands and requests. We can, then, pass them by, preoccupied with our important daily tasks, just as the priest-perhaps reading the Bible-passed by the man who had fallen among robbers. When we do that, we pass by the visible sign of the Cross raised in our lives to show us that God’s way, and not our own, is what counts.” ~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer
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“The ultimate test of a moral society is the kind of world that it leaves to its children.” ~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer
- “If our Christianity has ceased to be serious about discipleship, if we have watered down the gospel into emotional uplift which makes no costly demands and which fails to distinguish between natural and Christian existence, then we cannot help regarding the cross as an ordinary everyday calamity, as one of the trials and tribulations of life. We have then forgotten that the cross means rejection and shame as well as suffering .” ~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer Quotes
- “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.” ~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer
- “May God in His mercy lead us through these times; but above all, may He lead us to Himself.” ~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer
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“We must be ready to allow ourselves to be interrupted by God.” ~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer
- “Judging others makes us blind, whereas love is illuminating. By judging others we blind ourselves to our own evil and to the grace which others are just as entitled to as we are.”
- “In me there is darkness, But with You there is light; I am lonely, but You do not leave me; I am feeble in heart, but with You there is help; I am restless, but with You there is peace. In me there is bitterness, but with You there is patience; I do not understand Your ways, But You know the way for me.” “Lord Jesus Christ, You were poor And in distress, a captive and forsaken as I am. You know all man’s troubles; You abide with me When all men fail me; You remember and seek me; It is Your will that I should know You And turn to You. Lord, I hear Your call and follow; Help me.” ~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer
- “The first service that one owes to others in the fellowship consists of listening to them. Just as love of God begins with listening to his word, so the beginning of love for our brothers and sisters is learning to listen to them.” ~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer
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“The biggest mistake you can make in your life is to be always afraid of making a mistake.” ~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer
- “Christianity without discipleship is always Christianity without Christ.” ~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer
- “We must be ready to allow ourselves to be interrupted by God…..We must not…..assume that our schedule is our own to manage, but allow it to be arranged by God.” ~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer
- “Do not worry! Earthly goods deceive the human heart into believing that they give it security and freedom from worry. But in truth, they are what cause anxiety. The heart which clings to goods receives with them the choking burden of worry. Worry collects treasures, and treasures produce more worries. We desire to secure our lives with earthly goods; we want our worrying to make us worry-free, but the truth is the opposite. The chains which bind us to earthly goods, the clutches which hold the goods tight, are themselves worries.” ~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer Quotes
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“If you board the wrong train, it is no use running along the corridor in the other direction.” ~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer
- “The exclusion of the weak and insignificant, the seemingly useless people, from a Christian community may actually mean the exclusion of Christ; in the poor brother Christ is knocking at the door.” ~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer”The exclusion of the weak and insignificant, the seemingly useless people, from a Christian community may actually mean the exclusion of Christ; in the poor brother Christ is knocking at the door.” ~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer
- “I need the Christ that is in you, and you need the Christ that is in me.” ~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer God loves human beings. God loves the world. Not an ideal human, but human beings as they are; not an ideal world, but the real world. What we find repulsive in their opposition to God, what we shrink back from with pain and hostility, namely, real human beings, the real world, this is for God the ground of unfathomable love.” ~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer
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“When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.” ~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer
- “Love asks nothing in return, but seeks those who need it. And who needs our love more than those who are consumed with hatred and are utterly devoid of love.” ~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer
- “The pursuit of purity is not about the suppression of lust, but about the reorientation of one’s life to a larger goal.” ~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer
- “Only those who put tomorrow completely into God’s hand and receive fully today what they need for their lives are really secure.” ~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer
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“Faith without works is not faith at all, but a simple lack of obedience to God.” ~ Dietrich Bonhoeffe
- “God does not love some ideal person, but rather human beings just as we are, not some ideal world, but rather the real world.” ~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer
- “Time is lost when we have not lived a full human life, time unenriched by experience, creative endeavor, enjoyment, and suffering.” ~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Dietrich Bonhoeffer Quotes on suffering
- “The deceit, the lie of the Devil consists of this, that he wishes to
make man believe that he can live without God’s Word.” ~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer - “God is not a God of the emotions but the God of truth.” ~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer
