P. 88: "God is not free from human beings but for them."

P. 176: "If you board the wrong train, it is no use running along the corridor in the opposite direction."

P. 241: "There is no way to peace along the way of safety. For peace must be dared, it is itself the great venture and can never be safe. Peace is the opposite of security. To demand guarantees is to want to protect oneself. Peace means giving oneself completely to God's commandment, wanting no security, but in faith and obedience laying the destiny of the nations in the hand of Almighty God, not trying to direct itself for selfish purposes. Battles are won, not with weapons, but with God. They are won when the way leads to the cross. "

P. 342: "The Americans speak so much about freedom in their sermons. Freedom as a possession is a doubtful thing for a church; freedom must be won under the compulsion of necessity. Freedom for the church comes from the necessity of God. Otherwise it becomes arbitrariness and ends in a great many new ties. Whether the church in America is really 'free,' I doubt. They are lonely Sundays over here. Only the Word makes true community."

P. 349: "Where God tears great gaps we should not try to fill them with human words. They should remain open. Our only comfort is the God of the resurrection, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who also was and is His God. In Him we know our brothers and in Him is the abiding fellowship of those who have overcome and those who still await their hour."

P. 384: "Death reveals that the world is not as it should be but that it stands in need of redemption. Christ alone is the conquering of death. Here the sharp antithesis between 'God wills it' and 'God does not will it' comes to a head and finds its resolution. God accedes to that which God does not will, and from now on death must therefore serve God. From now on, the 'God wills it' encompasses even the 'God does not will it.' God wills the conquering of death through the death of Jesus Christ. Only in the cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ has death been drawn into God's power, and it must now serve God's own aims. It is not some fatalistic surrender but rather a living faith in Jesus Christ, who died and rose for us, that is able to cope profoundly with death.”

"In life with Jesus Christ, death as a general fate approaching us from without us confronted by death from within, one's own death, the free death of dying daily with Jesus Christ. Those who live with Christ die daily to their own will. Christ in us gives us over to death so that He can live within us. Thus our inner dying grows to meet that death from without. Christians receive their own death in this way, and in this way our physical death very truly becomes not the end but rather the fulfillment of our life with Jesus Christ. Here we enter into community with the One who at His own death was able to say, 'It is finished.'"

P. 471: “‘Be wise as serpents and innocent as doves’ is a saying of Jesus (Matt. 10:16). As with all of His sayings, it is He Himself who interprets it. No one can look at God and at the reality of the world with undivided gaze as long as God and the world are torn apart. Despite all efforts to prevent it the eyes still wander from one to the other. Only because there is one place where God and the reality of the world are reconciled with each other, at which God and humanity have become one, is it possible there and there alone to fix one’s eyes on God and the world together at the same time. This place does not lie somewhere beyond reality in the real of ideas. It lies in the midst of history as a divine miracle. It lies in Jesus Christ the reconciler of the world.”

P. 472: “No priest, no theologian stood at the cradle in Bethlehem. And yet, all Christian theology has its origin in the wonder of all wonders that God became man. Alongside the brilliance of holy night there burns the fire of the unfathomable mystery of Christian theology.”