Dietrich Bonhoeffer Life Quotations

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

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

Originally man was made in the image of God, but now his likeness to God is a stolen one. As the image of God man draws his life entirely from his origin in God, but the man who has become like God has forgotten how he was at his origin and has made himself his own creator and judge.

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

On Sunday 8 April 1945, he had just finished conducting a service of worship at Schoenberg, when two soldiers came took him away. As he left, he said to another prisoner, This is the end - but for me, the beginning - of life. He was hanged the next day, less than a week before the Allies reached the camp.

God has willed that we should seek and find God's living Word in the testimony of other Christians, in the mouths of human beings.

Who can really be faithful in great things if he has not learned to be faithful in the things of daily life?

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.

Fulfilled life is possible in spite of unfulfilled wishes.

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

After death something new begins, over which all powers of the world of death have no more might.

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.

The cross is not the terrible end to an otherwise God-fearing and happy life, but it meets us at the beginning of our communion with Christ. When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.

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