Dietrich Bonhoeffer quotes

"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." (The Cost of Discipleship)


"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." (The Cost of Discipleship)

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

"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."

"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."

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

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

"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." (Letters and Papers from Prison)

"Jesus himself did not try to convert the two thieves on the cross; he waited until one of them turned to him." (Letters and Papers from Prison)

"Discipleship is not an offer that man makes to Christ." (The Cost of Discipleship)

"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." (The Cost of Discipleship)

"time is the most valuable thing that we have, because it is the most irrevocable." (Letters and Papers from Prison)

"I'm still discovering, right up to this moment, that it is only by living completely in this world that one learns to have faith. I mean living unreservedly in life's duties, problems, successes and failures, experiences and perplexities. In so doing, we throw ourselves completely into the arms of God."