Top 100 Frederick Buechner Quotes
#1. Turn around and believe that the good news that we are loved is better than we ever dared hope, and that to believe in that good news, to live out of it and toward it, to be in love with that good news, is of all glad things in this world the gladdest thing of all. Amen, and come Lord Jesus.
Frederick Buechner
#2. know that neither to have the child nor not to have the child is without the possibility of tragic consequences for everybody yet (b) be brave in knowing also that not even that can put us beyond the forgiving love of God.
Frederick Buechner
#3. The past is the place we view the present from as much as the other way around.
Frederick Buechner
#4. At least for a moment we all saw, I think, that the danger of pluralism is that it becomes factionalism, and that if factions grind their separate axes too vociferously, something mutual, precious, and human is in danger of being drowned out and lost.
Frederick Buechner
#5. Many an atheist is a believer without knowing it juast as many a believer is an atheist without knowing it. You can sincerely believe there is no God and live as though there is. You can sincerely believe there is a God and live as though there isn't.
Frederick Buechner
#6. Every person has one particular time in his life when he is more beautiful than he is ever going to be again. For some it is at seven, for others at seventeen or seventy, and as Laura Fleischman read out loud from Shakespeare, I remember thinking that for her it was probably just then.
Frederick Buechner
#7. If you have never known the power of God's love, then maybe it is because you have never asked to know it - I mean really asked, expecting an answer.
Frederick Buechner
#8. Thus, when you wake up in the morning, called by God to be a self again, if you want to know who you are, watch your feet. Because where your feet take you, that is who you are.
Frederick Buechner
#9. All other days have either disappeared into darkness and oblivion or not yet emerged from it. Today is the only day there is.
Frederick Buechner
#10. Doubts are the ants in the pants of faith. They keep it awake and moving.
Frederick Buechner
#11. The life I touch for good or ill will touch another life, and in turn another, until who knows where the trembling stops or in what far place my touch will be felt.
Frederick Buechner
#12. The best moments any of us have as human beings are those moments when for a little while it is possible to escape the squirrel-cage of being me into the landscape of being us.
Frederick Buechner
#13. Vocation is the place where the world's greatest need and a person's greatest joy meet.
Frederick Buechner
#14. We cannot make the Kingdom of God happen, but we can put out leaves as it draws near. We can be kind to each other. We can be kind to ourselves. We can drive back the darkness a little. We can make green places within ourselves and among ourselves where God can make his Kingdom happen.
Frederick Buechner
#15. Remember that the lives of other people are not your business. They are their business. They are God's business because they all have God whether they use the word God or not. Even your own life is not your business. It also is God's business. Leave it to God.
Frederick Buechner
#17. We can know that in the beginning there was God and not just some cosmic upheaval that brought light out of darkness only when we have experienced him doing the same thing in our lives, our world
bringing light out of our darkness
Frederick Buechner
#18. You can kiss your family and friends good-bye and put miles between you, but at the same time you carry them with you in your heart, your mind, your stomach, because you do not just live in a world but a world lives in you.
Frederick Buechner
#19. To confess your sins to God is not to tell God anything God doesn't already know. Until you confess them, however, they are the abyss between you. When you confess them, they become the Golden Gate Bridge.
Frederick Buechner
#20. A miracle is when the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. A miracle is when one plus one equals a thousand.
Frederick Buechner
#21. I suspect that Jesus spoke many of his parables as a kind of sad and holy joke and that that may be part of why he seemed reluctant to explain them because if you have to explain a joke, you might as well save your breath.
Frederick Buechner
#22. Don't look down on them for looking down on us. Look at them, instead, as friends we don't know yet and who don't yet know what they are missing in not knowing us.
Frederick Buechner
#23. A Christian isn't necessarily any nicer than anybody else, just better informed.
Frederick Buechner
#24. I'm a hopeless pray-er. I think somewhere in there I spend a great deal of time at it.
Frederick Buechner
#25. Prayers out of, very often, not the most religious part of me, but the most anxious part of me, the most desperately loving, fearing part of me.
Frederick Buechner
#26. I find I need to put things into words before I can believe that they are entirely real.
Frederick Buechner
#27. One life on this earth is all that we get, whether it is enough or not enough, and the obvious conclusion would seem to be that at the very least we are fools if we do not live it as fully and bravely and beautifully as we can.
Frederick Buechner
#29. No words come easily to my lips. I think ultimately - what I like to think is that I'm in some sense hearing the mystery itself.
Frederick Buechner
#30. Remember me not for the ill I've done but for the good I've dreamed.
Frederick Buechner
#32. The sadness was I'd lost a father I had never fully found. It's like a tune that ends before you've heard it out. Your whole life through you search to catch the strain, and seek the face you've lost in strangers' faces.
Frederick Buechner
#33. Is it true, what Jesus believed, this Truth that he died for and lived for? Maybe the only way to know finally this side of falling off that precipice ourselves is to stop speaking and thinking and reading about it so much and to start watching and listening.
Frederick Buechner
#34. The grace of God means something like: Here is your life. You might never have been, but you are because the party wouldn't have been complete without you.
Frederick Buechner
#35. Beneath our clothes, our reputations, our pretensions, beneath our religion or lack of it, we are all vulnerable both to the storm without and the storm within.
Frederick Buechner
#37. It was not so much that a door opened as that I suddenly found that a door had been open all along which I had only just then stumbled upon.
Frederick Buechner
#38. Preaching and writing - it's the same. Whether I'm writing to speak or writing to be read in a book, it's the same thing. Y
Frederick Buechner
#39. I would go so far as to say that it may even have caused him to think the more highly of them because their unbelief grew from a far more honest view of the wretchedness of things than the belief of the devout who see only what they choose to see and turn a blind eye on the rest.
Frederick Buechner
#40. Words are in a way our godly sharing in the work of creation, and the speaking and writing of words is at once the most human and the most holy business we engage in.
Frederick Buechner
#41. Love yourself not in some egocentric, self-serving sense but love yourself the way you would love your friend in the sense of taking care of yourself, nourishing yourself, trying to understand, comfort, and strengthen yourself.
Frederick Buechner
#42. A Christian is one who points at Christ and says, 'I can't prove a thing, but there's something about his eyes and his voice. There's something about the way he carries his head, his hands, the way he carries his cross-the way he carries me.'
Frederick Buechner
#43. He also said we should carve in the year and place where I was born, but I said no. As a man dies many times before he's dead, so does he wend from birth to birth until, by grace, he comes alive at last.
Frederick Buechner
#44. God in his unending greatness and glory and man in his unending littleness, prepared for the worst but rarely for the best, prepared for the possible but rarely for the impossible.
Frederick Buechner
#46. When someone we love suffers, we suffer with that person, and we would not have it otherwise, because the suffering and the love are one, just as it is with God's love for us.
Frederick Buechner
#47. There is no event so common place but that God is present within it, always hidden, always leaving you room to recognize Him or not to recognize Him.
Frederick Buechner
#48. The real turning point in human history is less apt to be the day the wheel is invented or Rome falls than the day a boy is born to a couple of hick Jews.
Frederick Buechner
#49. Gail Godwin has written a book about the heaviest matters of loss, grief, and loneliness with a touch so light that I was as often deeply amused by it as I was deeply moved.
Frederick Buechner
#50. For outlandish creatures like us, on our way to a heart, a brain, and courage, Bethlehem is not the end of our journey but only the beginning - not home but the place through which we must pass if ever we are to reach home at last.
Frederick Buechner
#51. Speak in your own voice and speak about things that you have in some sense witnessed, not just things you read about or have been taught about in seminary. To talk about the resurrection, think about those moments where in some way you have been resurrected.
Frederick Buechner
#52. If you don't have doubts you're either kidding yourself or asleep. Doubts are the ants-in-the-pants of faith. They keep it alive and moving.
Frederick Buechner
#53. [T]o live not with hands clenched to grasp, to strike, to hold tight to a life that is always slipping away the more tightly we hold it, but ... to live with the hands stretched out both to give and receive with gladness.
Frederick Buechner
#54. If our pain doesn't destroy us, it just might transform us into truly human beings at last.
Frederick Buechner
#55. Our father. We have killed him, and we will kill him again, and our world will kill him. And yet he is there. It is he who listens at the door. It is he who is coming. It is our father who is about to be born. Through Jesus Christ our Lord.
Frederick Buechner
#56. Beneath the worst the world can do, there is always the glimmer of the best.
Frederick Buechner
#57. With words as valueless as poker chips, we play games whose object it is to keep us from seeing each other's cards.
Frederick Buechner
#58. The magic of words is that they have power to do more than convey meaning; not only do they have the power to make things clear, they make things happen.
Frederick Buechner
#59. I am such a person of words. I've spent so much of my life trying to get it right, say it right, say it eloquently, say it truthfully, say it honestly, that when I hear it said in ways that none of those adverbs would describe I find myself so repelled that it almost shuts my mind off.
Frederick Buechner
#61. The place to which God calls you is the place where your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet.
Frederick Buechner
#62. The Jesus who is the one whom we search for even when we do not know that we are searching and hide from even when we do not know that we are hiding.
Frederick Buechner
#63. If we are a people who pray, darkness is apt to be a lot of what our prayers are about. If we are people who do not pray, it is apt to be darkness in one form or another that has stopped our mouths.
Frederick Buechner
#67. Each one of us could describe his or her life as a sacred journey. You are journeying from the beginning to the end, and what makes it sacred is that in the process of this journey you encounter the holy in various forms which, unless you have your eyes open, you might not even notice.
Frederick Buechner
#68. Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery it is. In the boredom and pain of it, no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it, because in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace.
Frederick Buechner
#69. Wherever people love each other and are true to each other and take risks for each other, God is with them and for them and they are doing God's will.
Frederick Buechner
#70. To believe in Christ is to give your heart to Christ, which means not to affirm things about Christ, but it's like what you mean when you say, "I believe in my friend."
Frederick Buechner
#71. Faith is the assurance that the best and holiest dream is true after all.
Frederick Buechner
#73. You use your real voice with those you love, and you cannot be phony with those who know you well.
Frederick Buechner
#74. You can't be too careful what you tell a child because you never know what he'll take hold of and spend the rest of his life remembering you by.
Frederick Buechner
#75. I don't think Christ would give a hoot whether you mentioned Christ to them or not. What matters - I'm speaking arrogantly and absurdly - to him is, are you living the kind of life that I embodied? Whether you believe in Christ or don't, who cares?
Frederick Buechner
#76. We are commanded to love our neighbors as ourselves, and I believe that to love ourselves means to extend to those various selves that we have been along the way the same degree of compassion and concern that we would extend to anyone else.
Frederick Buechner
#77. The Jesus I follow is the peacemaker, is one who says forgive your enemies, who worries about the poor, who worries about the poorest of the poor instead of the richest of the rich.
Frederick Buechner
#78. To remember the past is to see that we are here today by grace, that we have survived as a gift.
Frederick Buechner
#79. A GLUTTON IS ONE who raids the icebox for a cure for spiritual malnutrition.
Frederick Buechner
#80. You do not need to understand healing to be healed or know anything about blessing to be blessed.
Frederick Buechner
#81. In his holy flirtation with the world, God occasionally drops a handkerchief. These handkerchiefs are called saints.
Frederick Buechner
#82. Your calling is where your own greatest joy intersects with the needs of the world.
Frederick Buechner
#83. What keeps the wild hope of Christmas alive year after year in a world notorious for dashing all hopes is the haunting dream that the child who was born that day may yet be born again even in us.
Frederick Buechner
#84. What deadens us most to God's presence within us, I think, is the inner dialogue that we are continually engaged in with ourselves, the endless chatter of human thought.
Frederick Buechner
#85. You hear as many things as you would imagine. I hear voices of people I loved once. I hear moments that took place. I hear silences.
Frederick Buechner
#86. I believe with the best of who I am in God, but I sometimes think if anybody would watch me and [they] didn't believe a damn thing, they would have a very hard time deciding which of us is which.
Frederick Buechner
#87. I'm not religious in the sense that I do not subscribe to any particular set of religious dogma. I don't go to church. I don't read the Bible. But I believe that the word "Spirit" with a capital S points to an ultimate reality which I give my heart to.
Frederick Buechner
#88. Of all powers, love is the most powerful and the most powerless. It is the most powerful because it alone can conquer that final and most impregnable stronghold which is the human heart. It is the most powerless because it can do nothing except by consent.
Frederick Buechner
#90. Matthew lists Rahab as one of the ancestresses of the Lord Jesus Christ (Matthew 1:5), and that may be one reason why there was something about free-wheeling ladies with warm and generous hearts that he was never quite able to resist.
Frederick Buechner
#91. I don't know how to save my own life, so anything they've found in what I've written that saved theirs - I can't take responsibility for it.
Frederick Buechner
#92. It is within the bonds of marriage that I, for one, found a greater freedom to be and to become and to share myself thatn I can imaine ever having found in any other kind of relationship.
Frederick Buechner
#93. Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don't be afraid.
Frederick Buechner
#94. I'm trying to listen to my past, listen to what's most deeply going on inside myself, my creative set of fictional characters, a fictional world - to listen to that world, to search.
Frederick Buechner
#95. Whether you call on him or don't call on him, God will be present with you.
Frederick Buechner
#96. Where your deep gladness meets with the deep hunger of the world, there you will find a further calling.
Frederick Buechner
#98. The world can give you these glimpses as well as fairy tales can
the smell of rain, the dazzle of sun on white clapboard with the shadows of ferns and wash on the line, the wildness of a winter storm when in the house the flame of a candle doesn't even flicker.
Frederick Buechner
#99. One of the blunders religious people are particularly fond of making is the attempt to be more spiritual than God.
Frederick Buechner
#100. That's five friends, one each for Jesu's wounds, and Godric bears their mark still on what's left of him as in their time they all bore his on them. What's friendship, when all's done, but the giving and taking of wounds?
Frederick Buechner
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