Dietrich Bonhoeffer, to Eberhard Bethge, Tuesday, November 30, 1943:

In the past few months I have experienced as never before that everything I receive here in the way of relief and help is thanks to other people and not to myself. I have previously sensed on occasion that you suffer somewhat from the fact that you too owe many things in your life to other people. But that is precisely the wrong way around. 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.