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Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

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Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Age: 39 †
Born: 1906
Born: February 4
Died: 1945
Died: April 8
Pastor
Philosopher
Poet
Resistance Fighter
Theologian
Breslau
Bonhoeffer
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More quotes by Dietrich Bonhoeffer

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If you board the wrong train, it is no use running along the corridor in the other direction.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
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Human love has little regard for the truth. It makes the truth relative, since nothing, not even the truth, must come between it and the beloved person.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
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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.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
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Political action means taking on responsibility. This cannot happen without power. Power is to serve responsibility.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
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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.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
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...And then, just when everything is bearing down on us to such an extent that we can scarcely withstand it, the Christmas message comes to tell us that all our ideas are wrong, and that what we take to be evil and dark is really good and light because it comes from God. Our eyes are at fault, that is all.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
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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.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
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A pastor should never complain about his congregation, certainly never to other people, but also not to God. A congregation has not been entrusted to him in order that he should become its accuser before God and men.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
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Christians have forgotten that the ministry of listening has been committed to them by Him who is Himself the great listener and whose work they should share. We should listen with the ears of God that we may speak the Word of God.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
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Prayer is the supreme instance of the hidden character of the Christian life.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
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The best-informed man is not necessarily the wisest. Indeed there is a danger that precisely in the multiplicity of his knowledge he will lose sight of what is essential.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
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If any want to become my followers, Jesus says. Following him is not something that is self-evident, even among the disciples. No one can be forced, no one can be expected to follow him. ... If any want to follow me, they must deny themselves ... and take up their cross.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
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There remains an experience of incomparable value.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
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The biggest mistake you can make in your life is to be always afraid of making a mistake.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
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God loves human beings. God loves the world. Not an ideal human, but human beings as they are not an ideal world, but the real world. What we find repulsive in their opposition to God, what we shrink back from with pain and hostility, namely, real human beings, the real world, this is for God the ground of unfathomable love.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
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Sanctification means that the Christians have been judged already, and that they are being preserved until the coming of Christ and are ever advancing towards it.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
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The child asks of the Father whom he knows. Thus, the essence of Christian prayer is not general adoration, but definite, concrete petition. The right way to approach God is to stretch out our hands and ask of One who we know has the heart of a Father.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
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God is in the manger, wealth in poverty, light in darkness, succor in abandonment. No evil can befall us whatever men may do to us, they cannot but serve the God who is secretly revealed as love and rules the world and our lives.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
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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.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
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In the New Testament our enemies are those who harbor hostility against us, not those against whom we cherish hostility, for Jesus refuses to reckon with such a possibility.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer