Quotes by Dietrich Bonhoeffer (Page 2 of 2)

You can only learn what obedience is by obeying.

Telling the truth ... is not solely a matter of moral character; it is also a matter of correct appreciation of real situations and of serious reflection upon them.

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

Intercessory prayer is the purifying bath into which the individual and the community must enter every day.

Thinking in terms of two realms understands the paired concepts worldy-Christia n, natural-superna tural, profane-sacred, rational-revela tions, as ultimate static opposites...and fails to recognize the original unity of these opposites in the Christ-reality.

The more deeply we grow into the psalms and the more often we pray them as our own, the more simple and rich will our prayer become.

Gratitude transforms the torment of memory of good things now gone into silent joy. One bears what was lovely in the past not as a thorn but as a precious gift deep within, a hidden treasure of which one can always be certain.

Advent creates people, new people.

A love that left people alone in their guilt would not have real people as its object. So, in vicarious responsibility for people, and in His love for real human beings, Jesus becomes the one burdened by guilt.

And we simply cannot be constant with the fact that God's cause is not always the successful one, that we really could be unsuccessful; and yet be on the right road. But this is where we find out whether we have begun in faith or in a burst of enthusiasm.

Justification is the new creation of the new man, and sanctification his preservation until the day of Jesus Christ.

After he has been following Christ for a long time, the disciple of Jesus will be asked, Lacked ye anything? and he will answer Nothing, Lord. How could he when he knows that despite hunger and nakedness, persecution and danger, the Lord is always at his side?

God comes into the very midst of evil and of death, and judges the evil in us and in the world. And by judging us, he cleanses and sanctifies us, comes to us with his grace and love. He makes us happy as only children can be happy.

By his willingly renouncing self-defence, the Christian affirms his absolute adherence to Jesus, and his freedom from the tyranny of his own ego. The exclusiveness of this adherence is the only power which can overcome evil.

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. Once more, all that self-denial can say is, 'He leads the way, keep close to Him.'

It is worse for a liar to tell the truth than for a lover of truth to lie.... There is a truth which is of Satan. Its essence is that under the semblance of truth it denies everything that is real. It lives upon hatred of the real world which is created and loved by God.

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.

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.

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

The restoration of the church must surely depend on a new kind of monasticism, which has nothing in common with the old but a life of uncompromising discipleship, following Christ according to the sermon on the mount.  I believe the time has come to gather people together to do this.

I believe that God both wills and is able to bring good out of everything, even the worst... I believe that even our mistakes and wrongdoing are not fruitless.

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.

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

It is not your love that sustains the marriage, but from now on, the marriage that sustains your love.

Blessed are those who are alone in the strength of the community. Blessed are those who preserve community in the strength of solitude. But the strength of solitude and the strength of community is the strength of the Word of God alone, which is meant for the individual in the community.

The entire day receives order and discipline when it acquires unity. This unity must be sought and found in morning prayer. The morning prayer determines the day.

It matters little what form of prayer we adopt or how many words we use. What matters is the faith which lays hold on God, knowing that He knows our needs before we even ask Him. That is what gives Christian prayer its boundless confidence and its joyous certainty.

While we exert ourselves to grow beyond our humanity, to leave the human behind us, God becomes human; and we must recognize that God wills that we be human, real human beings. While we distinguish between pious and godless, good and evil, noble and base, God loves real people without distinction.

Silence in the face of evil is evil itself.

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.

The only man who has the right to say that he is justified by grace alone is the man who has left all to follow Christ.

The Christian must treat his enemy as a brother, and requite his hostility with love. His behavior must be determined not by the way others treat him, but by the treatment he himself receives from Jesus; it has only one source, and that is the will of Jesus.

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

The Church is her true self only when she exists for humanity. As a fresh start, she should give away all her endowments to the poor and needy. The clergy should live solely on the freewill offerings of their congregations, or possibly engage in some secular calling.

The Church is the Church only when it exists for others...not dominating, but helping and serving. It must tell men of every calling what it means to live for Christ, to exist for others.

The way to misuse our possessions is to use them as an insurance against the morrow. Anxiety is always directed to the morrow, whereas goods are in the strictest sense meant to be used only for to-day.

Each morning is a new beginning of our life. Each day is a finished whole. The present day marks the boundary of our cares and concerns. It is long enough to find God or lose Him, to keep faith or fall into disgrace.

Good Friday and Easter free us to think about other things far beyond our own personal fate, about the ultimate meaning of all life, suffering, and events; and we lay hold of a great hope.

We have learnt, rather too late, that action comes, not from thought, but from a readiness for responsibility.

If we would answer the question of the existence of the Evil then we would not be sinners, we could make something else responsible.

In other times it may have been the business of Christianity to champion the equality of all men; its business today will be to defend passionately human dignity and reserve.

The disciple simply burns his boats and goes ahead. He is called out... The old life is left behind, and completely surrendered. The disciple is dragged out of his relative security into a life of absolute insecurity... out of the realm of the finite...into the realm of infinite possibilities.

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

Faith without works is not faith at all, but a simple lack of obedience to God.

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.

Wherever there are sinners, the weak, the sorrowful, the poor in the world, that is where God goes.

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

Anything I cannot thank God for for the sake of Christ, I may not thank God for at all; to do so would be sin. ... We cannot rightly acknowledge the gifts of God unless we acknowledge the Mediator for whose sake alone they are given to us.

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.

To endure the cross is not tragedy; it is the suffering which is the fruit of an exclusive allegiance to Jesus Christ.

God's truth judges created things out of love, and Satan's truth judges them out of envy and hatred.

Only he who believes is obedient and only he who is obedient believes.

One act of obedience is better than one hundred sermons.

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

It is the nature, and the advantage, of strong people that they can bring out the crucial questions and form a clear opinion about them. The weak always have to decide between alternatives that are not their own.

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.

It is very easy to overestimate the importance of our own achievements in comparison with what we owe others.

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