God does not give us everything we want, but He does fulfill His promises, leading us along the best and straightest paths to Himself.

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

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

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

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

Most people have forgotten nowadays what a house can mean, though some of us have come to realize it as never before. It is a kingdom of its own in the midst of the world, a stronghold amid life's storms and stresses, a refuge, even a sanctuary. -- Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison.

Loving God means rejoicing in God, being eager to think of and pray to God. It means being glad to be in God's presence and to be with God alone. It means not grieving God, but rejoicing in God simply because it is God who is involved, and because we are permitted to know and have God, and to speak with and live with God.

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.

Many people seek fellowship because they are afraid to be alone...let him who cannot be alone beware of community. He will do harm to himself and to the community. Alone you stood before God when he called you; alone you had to answer that call; alone you had to struggle and pray; and alone you will die and give an account to God. You cannot escape yourself, for God has singled you out.

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.

Monastic life thus became a living protest against the secularization of Christianity, against the cheapening of grace.

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 church ... is not just to bandage the victims under the wheel, but to put a spoke in the wheel itself.

A father acts on behalf of his children by working, providing, intervening, struggling, and suffering for them. In so doing, he really stands in their place. He is not an isolated individual, but incorporates the selves of several people in his own self.

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.

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.

But to procrastinate and prevaricate simply because you're afraid of erring, when others -- I mean our brethren in Germany -- must make infinitely more difficult decisions every day, seems to me almost to run counter to love. To delay or fail to make decisions may be more sinful than to make wrong decisions out of faith and love.

The word of cheap grace has been the ruin of more Christians than any commandment of works.

Not hero worship, but intimacy with Christ.