Quotes from Dietrich Bonhoeffer

There is the question of resistance and of submission in the right place; that is, resistance to the devil is only possible in the fullest submission to the hand of God.

There is no resistance to Satan other than flight. Every struggle against lust in one's own strength is doomed to failure. Flee—that can indeed only mean, Flee to that place where you find protection and help flee to the Crucified.

But what is the finest book, or picture, or house, or estate, to me, compared to my wife, my parents, or my friend.

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.

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.

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.

Jesus himself did not try to convert the two thieves on the cross; he waited until one of them turned to him.

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

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.

In a word, live together in the forgiveness of your sins, for without it no human fellowship, least of all a marriage, can survive. Don't insist on your rights, don't blame each other, don't judge or condemn each other, don't find fault with each other, but accept each other as you are, and forgive each other every day from the bottom of your hearts…

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.

Action springs not from thought, but from a readiness for responsibility.