Letters and Papers from Prison QUOTES

1 " As you gave the ring to one another and have now received it a 2nd time from the hand of the pastor, so love comes from you, but marriage from above, from God. As high as God is above man, so high are the sanctity, the rights, and the promise of love.
It is not your love tht sustains the marriage, but from now on, the marriage that sustains your love. "

― Dietrich Bonhoeffer , Letters and Papers from Prison

2 " Who stands fast? Only the man whose final standard is not his reason, his principles, his conscience, his freedom, or his virtue, but who is ready to sacrifice all this when he is called to obedient and responsible action in faith and in exclusive allegiance to God--the responsible man, who tries to make his whole life an answer to the question and call of God. "

― Dietrich Bonhoeffer , Letters and Papers from Prison

3 " The more we have known of the really good things, the more insipid the thin lemonade of later literature becomes, sometimes almost to the point of making us sick. Do you know a work of literature written in the last, say, fifteen years that you think has any lasting quality? I don't. It is partly idle chatter, partly propaganda, partly self-pitying sentimentality, but there is no insight, no ideas, no clarity, no substance and almost always the language is bad and constrained. On this subject I am quite consciously a laudator temporis acti. "

― Dietrich Bonhoeffer , Letters and Papers from Prison

4 " If we look more closely, we see that any violent display of power, whether political or religious, produces an outburst of folly in a large part of mankind; indeed, this seems actually to be a psychological and sociological law: the power of some needs the folly of others. It is not that certain human capacities, intellectual capacities for instance, become stunted of destroyed, but rather that the upsurge of power makes such an overwhelming impression that men are deprived of their independent judgment, and...give up trying to assess the new state of affairs for themselves. "

― Dietrich Bonhoeffer , Letters and Papers from Prison

5 " 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… "

― Dietrich Bonhoeffer , Letters and Papers from Prison

6 " We have been silent witnesses of evil deeds; we have been drenched by many storms; we have learnt the arts of equivocation and pretence; experience has made us suspicious of others and kept us from being truthful and open; intolerable conflicts have worn us down and even made us cynical. Are we still of any use? What we shall need is not geniuses, or cynics, or misanthropes, or clever tacticians, but plain, honest, and straightforward men. Will our inward power of resistance be strong enough, and our honesty with ourselves remorseless enough, for us to find our way back to simplicity and straightforwardness? "

― Dietrich Bonhoeffer , Letters and Papers from Prison

7 " As God adds his ‘Yes’ to your ‘Yes,’ as he confirms your will with his will, and as he allows you, and approves of, your triumph and rejoicing and pride, he makes you at the same time instruments of his will and purpose both for yourselves and for others. In his unfathomable condescension God does add his ‘Yes’ to yours; but by doing so, he creates out of your love something quite new – the holy estate of matrimony… "

― Dietrich Bonhoeffer , Letters and Papers from Prison

8 " Every wedding must be an occasion of joy that human beings can do such great things, that they have been given such immense freedom and power to take the helm in their life’s journey… "

― Dietrich Bonhoeffer , Letters and Papers from Prison

9 " We ought not to be in too much of a hurry here to speak piously of God’s will and guidance. It is obvious, and it should not be ignored, that it is your own very human wills that are at work here, celebrating their triumph; the course that you are taking at the outset is one that you have chosen for yourselves… "

― Dietrich Bonhoeffer , Letters and Papers from Prison

10 " 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. "

― Dietrich Bonhoeffer , Letters and Papers from Prison

11 " We have to learn that personal suffering is a more effective key, a more rewarding principle for exploring the world in thought and action than personal good fortune. "

― Dietrich Bonhoeffer , Letters and Papers from Prison

12 " 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. "

― Dietrich Bonhoeffer , Letters and Papers from Prison

13 " The Church is the Church only when it exists for others...not dominating, but helping and serving. It must tell men of every calling what it means to live for Christ, to exist for others. "

― Dietrich Bonhoeffer , Letters and Papers from Prison

14 " In other times it may have been the business of Christianity to champion the equality of all men; its business today will be to defend passionately human dignity and reserve. "

― Dietrich Bonhoeffer , Letters and Papers from Prison

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

― Dietrich Bonhoeffer , Letters and Papers from Prison

16 " The fact that the stupid person is often stubborn must not blind us to the fact that he is not independent. In conversation with him, one virtually feels that one is dealing not at all with him as a person, but with slogans, catchwords, and the like that have taken possession of him. He is under a spell, blinded, misused, and abused in his very being. Having thus become a mindless tool, the stupid person will also be capable of any evil and at the same time incapable of seeing that it is evil. This is where the danger of diabolical misuse lurks, for it is this that can once and for all destroy human beings. "

― Dietrich Bonhoeffer , Letters and Papers from Prison

17 " The wish to have everything by one’s own power is false pride. Even what one owes to others belongs nevertheless to oneself and is a piece of one’s own life, and the desire to calculate what one has 'earned' on one’s own and what one owes to others is surely not Christian and is a futile undertaking besides. With what one is in oneself and what one receives, a person is a whole. "

― Dietrich Bonhoeffer , Letters and Papers from Prison

18 " The 'polymath' had already died out by the close of the eighteenth century, and in the following century intensive education replaced extensive, so that by the end of it the specialist had evolved. The consequence is that today everyone is a mere technician, even the artist... "

― Dietrich Bonhoeffer , Letters and Papers from Prison

19 " 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 "

― Dietrich Bonhoeffer , Letters and Papers from Prison

20 " Barth was the first theologian to begin the criticism of religion...but he set in its place the positivist doctrine of revelation which says in effect, 'Take it or leave it': Virgin Birth, Trinity or anything else, everything which is an equally significant and necessary part of the whole, which latter has to be swallowed as a whole or not at all. That is not in accordance with the Bible. There are degrees of perception and degrees of significance, i.e. a secret discipline must be re-established whereby the mysteries of the Christian faith are preserved from profanation. "

― Dietrich Bonhoeffer , Letters and Papers from Prison