Quotes about Reflection

The time when you should most of all withdraw into yourself is when you are forced to be in a crowd.

if a person fights the clear evidence of his senses he will never be able to share in genuine tranquillity

We must free ourselves from the prison of everyday affairs and politics.

It's a great thing learning how to die.

We become like the God/god we behold. We appear like the God/god we admire. We duplicate the God/god we deify. We favor the God/god we follow. We match the God/god we magnify.

Bonhoeffer's change was not an ungainly, embarrassing leap from which he would have to retreat slightly when he gained more maturity and perspective. It was by all accounts a deepening consistent with what had gone before.

Heroism and ignominy both are part of our history. The only question is whether, having seen both, we can repent of the one and rejoice and be inspired by the other. Or whether we will let one of them tempt us so far away from the other that we have a deeply distorted view.

May God in his mercy lead us through these times; but above all, may he lead us to himself...

However thankful we may be for all our personal pleasures, we mustn't for a moment lose sight of the great things that we're living for, and they must shed light rather than gloom on your joy.

Bonhoeffer openly thought things through and taught his students to do the same. They followed lines of reasoning to their logical conclusions and considered every angle to have a sense of absolute thoroughness, so that nothing depended on mere emotion.

He willed the entire life of believers to be one of repentance.

From the beginning of his time until the end, Bonhoeffer maintained the daily discipline of scriptural meditation and prayer he had been practicing for more than a decade. Each morning he meditated for at least half an hour on a verse of Scripture. And he interceded for his friends and relatives, and for his brothers in the Confessing Church who were on the front lines or in concentration camps.