Several times Bonhoeffer used Barth's image of the Tower of Babel as a picture of "religion," of man trying to reach heaven through his own efforts, which always failed.

To be human is to be beautifully flawed

Because we're human beings, we're not always going to be perfect.

It is astonishing the sense of innocence that goes with sin--only the hard and careful man and the saint are free of it.

What's the good? he'll always be innocent, you can't blame the innocent, they are always guiltless. All you can do is control them or eliminate them. Innocence is a kind of insanity.

That was another mystery: it sometimes seemed to him that venial sins—impatience, an unimportant lie, pride, a neglected opportunity—cut you off from grace more completely than the worst sins of all.

It is only if the murderer is a good man that he can be regarded as monstrous.

While people involved in religious forms of the flesh may believe they are taking sin seriously by persistently reminding people to stop doing it, they are actually trivializing sin by depicting it as something that can be overcome through behavior modification.

The sinner... while retaining the ability to imagine, has forfeited the basis on which to imagine God.

The picture of God that I embraced could get me to feel shame for my sinful deeds, but it could not empower me to rise above them.

Sin and forgiveness and falling and getting back up and losing the pearl of great price in the couch cushions but then finding it again, and again, and again? Those are the stumbling steps to becoming Real, the only script that's really worth following in this world or the one that's coming.

Because of total depravity, you and I were desperate for God's grace before we were saved. Because of total depravity, you and I remain desperate for God's grace even after we're saved.