Quotes from Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Salvation is free, but discipleship will cost you your life

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

The pursuit of purity is not about the suppression of lust, but about the reorientation of one's life to a larger goal.

Once a man has truly experienced the mercy of God in his life he will henceforth aspire only to serve.

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

Only those who put tomorrow completely into God's hand and receive fully today what they need for their lives are really secure.

The essence of optimism is that it takes no account of the present, but it is a source of inspiration, of vitality and hope where others have resigned; it enables a man to hold his head high, to claim the future for himself and not to abandon it to his enemy.

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.

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

So the Christian, too, belongs not in the seclusion of a cloistered life but in the thick of foes. There is his commission, his work.

God has reserved to Himself the right to determine the end of life, because He alone knows the goal to which it is His will to lead it. It is for Him alone to justify a life or to cast it away.

A home is a kingdom of it's own in the midst of the world, a stronghold amid life's storms and stresses, a refuge, even a sanctuary.

The consciousness of being borne up by a spiritual tradition that goes back for centuries gives one a feeling of confidence and security in the face of all passing strains and stresses.

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

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

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

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

One act of obedience is better than one hundred sermons.

It is only with gratitude that life becomes rich!

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

If you do a good job for others, you heal yourself at the same time, because a dose of joy is a spiritual cure.

The time is short. Eternity is long. It is the time of decision.

Jesus' commandment never wishes to destroy life, but rather to preserve, strengthen, and heal life.

The church must share in the secular problems of ordinary human life, not dominating, but helping and serving.