Quotes from Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Decisions, demanded by work, become easier and simpler where they are made not in the fear of men but only in the sight of God.

Beten heißt Gott nahekommen und nahe bleiben wollen, weil er uns nahegekommen ist. Beten können wir nur, weil Christus da ist, in ihm hat unser Gebet seinen Grund, denn durch ihn haben wir Gott zum Vater.

We must learn to regard people less in the light of what they do or omit to do, and more in the light of what they suffer.

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.

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.

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.

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

By judging others we blind ourselves to our own evil and to the grace which others are just as entitled to as we are.

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

In normal life we hardly realize how much more we receive than we give, and life cannot be rich without such gratitude. It is so easy to overestimate the importance of our own achievements compared with what we owe to the help of others.

If you board the wrong train, it is no use running along the corridor in the other direction.

In a word, live together in the forgiveness of your sins, for without it no human fellowship, least of all a marriage, can survive. Don't insist on your rights, don't blame each other, don't judge or condemn each other, don't find fault with each other, but accept each other as you are, and forgive each other every day from the bottom of your hearts…

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.

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

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

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

A God who let us prove his existence would be an idol

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

Silence in the face of evil is itself evil: God will not hold us guiltless. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act.

The person who loves their dream of community will destroy community, but the person who loves those around them will create community.

It is only because he became like us that we can become like him.

Let him who cannot be alone beware of community... Let him who is not in community beware of being alone... Each by itself has profound perils and pitfalls. One who wants fellowship without solitude plunges into the void of words and feelings, and the one who seeks solitude without fellowship perishes in the abyss of vanity, self-infatuation and despair.

Discipleship is not an offer that man makes to Christ.

Nothing that we despise in other men is inherently absent from ourselves. We must learn to regard people less in the light of what they do or don't do, and more in light of what they suffer.