Top 100 Buechner Quotes
#1. How do I happen to believe in God? . . . Writing novels, I got into the habit of looking for plots. After awhile, I began to suspect that my own life had a plot. And after awhile more, I began to suspect that life itself has a plot. - FREDERICK BUECHNER
Sarah Arthur
#2. Buechner uses words with such transformative power that any comment on them is like the moon palely reflecting the sun.
Walter Brueggemann
#3. rejoice and make a fool of yourself for God the way lovers have always made fools of themselves for the one they love." - Frederick Buechner, Beyond Words
Richard J. Foster
#4. Frederick Buechner writes, Turn around and believe that the good news that we are loved is gooder 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.
Philip Yancey
#5. As Buechner says, we are in constant danger of being not actors in the drama of our lives but reactors, to go where the world takes us, to drift with whatever current happens to be running the strongest.
John Eldredge
#6. In the beginning, we're told, was the word. Every once in a while someone shows up on the planet who is word-obsessed and word-gifted; and the light and darkness get named again. In our day, that someone is Buechner.
John Ortberg
#7. Frederick Buechner brings the reader to his knees, sometimes in laughter, sometimes in an astonishment very close to prayer, and at the best of times in a combination of both.
Michael Mewshaw
#8. When I forget the power of the word, I read Frederick Buechner. When I forget the deep relief of telling the truth, I read Frederick Buechner. When I forget to look for the holiness all around me, I read Frederick Buechner. When I forget why the gospel matters, I read Frederick Buechner.
Barbara Brown Taylor
#9. Christopher Knowles, Buechner, Heiner Mueller, Burroughs, Chekhov, Shakespeare - it's all one body of work.
Robert Wilson
#10. Frederick Buechner is one of my favorite writers. The Eyes of the Heart is beautiful and wise, full of insight, charm, and tenderness.
Anne Lamott
#11. Buechner is a worthy member of the great prose stylists: Pascal, Newman, and Merton, who have harnessed their art to a passionate religious faith.
Louis Auchincloss
#12. You don't have to be in the habit of going to church to listen to such a literary minister; you don't have to be a believer to be moved by Mr. Buechner's faith.
John Irving
#13. Without somehow destroying me in the process, how could God reveal himself in a way that would leave no room for doubt? If there was no room for doubt, there would be no room for me. - FREDERICK BUECHNER
John Irving
#14. As Frederick Buechner wrote, Vocation is the place where our deep gladness meets the world's deep need.
Jeff Goins
#15. Frederick Buechner can find grace and redemption even in the shoddiest, phoniest aspects of a cultural wasteland. One reads Lion Country ... with hope and delight.
Louis Auchincloss
#16. 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
#17. Words spoken in deep love or deep hate set things in motion in the human heart that can never be reversed
Frederick Buechner
#18. Again - "Are you going home for Christmas?" - and asked it in some sort of way that brought tears to my eyes and made it almost unnecessary for him to move on to his answer to the question, which was that home, finally, is the manger in Bethlehem, the place where at midnight even the oxen kneel.
Frederick Buechner
#19. 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
#20. Pay attention to the things that bring a tear to your eye or a lump in your throat because they are signs that the holy is drawing near.
Frederick Buechner
#21. It's not as if I knew answers which I am going to set down in the form of a novel or a memoir or a sermon. It's, rather, I'm going to search myself for what I might have to say in this area.
Frederick Buechner
#22. The past is the place we view the present from as much as the other way around.
Frederick Buechner
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. 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
#26. Lord, catch me off guard today. Surprise me with some moment of beauty or pain so that at least for the moment, I may be startled into seeing that you are here in all your splendor, always and everywhere, barely hidden, beneath, beyond, within this life I breathe.
Frederick Buechner
#27. 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
#28. I think that I learned something about how even tragedy can be a means of grace that I might never have come to any other way.
Frederick Buechner
#29. 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
#30. In the long run, there can be no joy for anybody until there is joy finally for us all
Frederick Buechner
#31. 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
#32. Doubts are the ants in the pants of faith. They keep it awake and moving.
Frederick Buechner
#33. Do good work. Don't worry about expressing yourself. Figure out what you do well and make it better.
Thomas S. Buechner
#34. 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
#35. In New England, especially, [faith] is like sex. It's very personal. You don't bring it out and talk about it.
Frederick Buechner
#36. A single model enables me to focus on one thing at a time, separating design and form and color into three successive stages.
Thomas S. Buechner
#37. And now brothers, I will ask you a terrible question, and God knows I ask it also of myself. Is the truth beyond all truths, beyond the stars, just this: that to live without him is the real death, that to die with him the only life?
Frederick Buechner
#38. 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
#39. Vocation is the place where the world's greatest need and a person's greatest joy meet.
Frederick Buechner
#40. O thou who art the sparrow's friend," he said, "have mercy on this world that knows not even when it sins. O holy dove, descend and roost on Godric here so that a heart may hatch in him at last. Amen
Frederick Buechner
#41. 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
#42. To be bored is to turn a cold shoulder to engage all that God is and has for you in the moment.
Frederick Buechner
#43. 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
#45. It is as impossible for man to demonstrate the existence of God as it would be for even Sherlock Holmes to demonstrate the existence of Arthur Conan Doyle.
Frederick Buechner
#46. In other words to live Eternal Life in the full and final sense is to be with God as Christ is with him, and with each other as Christ is with us.
Frederick Buechner
#47. It is in the intellectual and emotional response, the conscious and subconscious associations of the artist, that the potential power of painting lies.
Thomas S. Buechner
#48. I was deeply influenced by an Episcopal laywoman named Agnes Sanford, who in her day was quite famous as a faith healer, which is a term I've always distrusted, because it conjures up charlatanry. She was not a charlatan. She was the real thing, and she had had remarkable healings.
Frederick Buechner
#49. Think of these pages as graffiti maybe, and where I have scratched up in a public place my longings and loves, my grievances and indecencies, be reminded in private of your own. In that way, at least, we can hold a kind of converse.
Frederick Buechner
#51. The preacher speaks both the word of tragedy and the word of comedy because they are both of them the truth and because Jesus speaks them both ...
Frederick Buechner
#53. Here and there even in our world, and now and then, even in ourselves, we catch glimpeses of a New Creation, which, fleeting as those glipmses are apt to be, give us hope both for this life and for whatever life may await us later on.
Frederick Buechner
#54. We find by losing. We hold fast by letting go. We become something new by ceasing to be something old.
Frederick Buechner
#55. Jesus didn't come to merely speak words that were true, He is the Word that makes us true.
Frederick Buechner
#56. Lord, I believe; help my unbelief' is the best any of us can do really, but thank God it is enough.
Frederick Buechner
#57. 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
#58. 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
#59. This side of Nirvana, there is no such escape for any of us as far as I know.
Frederick Buechner
#60. 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
#61. Unbelief is as much of a choice as belief is. What makes it in many ways more appealing is that whereas to believe in something requires some measure of understanding and effort, not to believe doesn't require much of anything at all.
Frederick Buechner
#62. 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
#64. 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
#65. The incarnation is a kind of vast joke whereby the Creator of the ends of the earth comes among us in diapers ... Until we too have taken the idea of the God-man seriously enough to be scandalized by it, we have not taken it as seriously as it demands to be taken.
Frederick Buechner
#66. I can only assume that he must have dreamed it up at the last minute and ad-libbed it - and on just such foolish, tenuous, holy threads as that, I suppose, hang the destinies of us all.
Frederick Buechner
#67. 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
#68. It is not objective proof of God's existence that we want but, whether we use religious language for it or not, the experience of God's presence.
Frederick Buechner
#69. A Christian isn't necessarily any nicer than anybody else, just better informed.
Frederick Buechner
#71. I'm a hopeless pray-er. I think somewhere in there I spend a great deal of time at it.
Frederick Buechner
#72. 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
#73. I find I need to put things into words before I can believe that they are entirely real.
Frederick Buechner
#74. 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
#75. Have you ever hung a piece of black velvet behind you and looked at yourself in the mirror? We are each of us quite alone, and that's what I try to paint.
Thomas S. Buechner
#77. I hold my plush monkey over the bannister and let it drop. Its eyes light up when you squeeze its kidneys as whose eyes, I suppose, would not.
Frederick Buechner
#78. 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
#79. There's no way to earn it or deserve it or bring it about any more than you can deserve the taste of raspberries and cream or earn good looks or bring about your own birth.
Frederick Buechner
#80. Remember me not for the ill I've done but for the good I've dreamed.
Frederick Buechner
#81. True faith, a simple life, a helping hand- the three things prized most in Heaven.
Frederick Buechner
#82. Faith in God is less apt to proceed from miracles than miracles from faith in God.
Frederick Buechner
#84. 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
#86. If preachers decide to preach about hope, let them preach out of what they themselves hope for.
Frederick Buechner
#87. 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
#88. 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
#89. Once we have seen Him in a stable, we can never be sure where He will appear or to what lengths he will go or to what ludicrous depths of self-humiliation He will descend in His wild pursuit of men.
Frederick Buechner
#90. If you want to talk about grace, if you want to talk about revelation, talk about your life with some depth, which doesn't mean lurid revelations as much as simply looking at your own deep experiences and describing them as they are.
Frederick Buechner
#91. Not to love is, psychically, spiritually, to die. To live for yourself alone, hoarding your life for your own sake, is in almost every sense that matters to reduce your life to a life hardly worth the living, and thus to lose it.
Frederick Buechner
#93. 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
#94. It's less the words they say than those they leave unsaid that split old friends apart.
Frederick Buechner
#95. Even the saddest things can become, once we have made peace with them, a source of wisdom and strength.
Frederick Buechner
#96. When [our secrets] are sad and hurtful secrets, like my father's death, we can in a way honor the hurt by letting ourselves feel it as we never let ourselves feel it before, and then, having felt it, by laying it aside; we can start to take care of ourselves the way we take care of people we love.
Frederick Buechner
#98. 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
#99. Through the power that memory gives us of thinking, feeling, imagining our way back through time we can at long last finally finish with the past in the sense of removing its power to hurt us and other people and to stunt our growth as human beings.
Frederick Buechner
#100. The contradiction is resolved when you realize that for Jesus peace seems to have meant not the absence of struggle, but the presence of love. -p83
Frederick Buechner
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