Frederick Buechner quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Frederick Buechner

Frederick Buechner Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Frederick Buechner on Wise Famous Quotes.

Maybe the truth of it is that it's too good not to be true.

All other days have either disappeared into darkness and oblivion or not yet emerged from it. Today is the only day there is.

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.

To be wise is to be eternally curious.

Words are not only meaning but music and magic and power.

If preachers decide to preach about hope, let them preach out of what they themselves hope for.

Vocation is the place where the world's greatest need and a person's greatest joy meet.

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

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.

Listen to your life. All moments are key moments.

The world needs people who save lives.

You have to suffer in order to be beautiful.

You do not need to understand healing to be healed or know anything about blessing to be blessed.

You can never be sure whether you are discovering the truth or inventing it.

At the evening of our day, we shall be judged by our loving.

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.

To remember the past is to see that we are here today by grace, that we have survived as a gift.

Remember me not for the ill I've done but for the good I've dreamed.

We are in constant danger of being not actors in the drama of our own lives but reactors.

God doesn't reveal his grand design. He reveals Himself.

I'm a hopeless pray-er. I think somewhere in there I spend a great deal of time at it.

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.

In the long run, there can be no joy for anybody until there is joy finally for us all

With words as valueless as poker chips, we play games whose object it is to keep us from seeing each other's cards.

A miracle is when the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. A miracle is when one plus one equals a thousand.

The world is in pain, and its pain makes strangers of us all and ties my tongue in a lover's knot.

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.

Envy is the consuming desire to have everybody else as unsuccessful as you are.

Pray anyway. Who knows what God can do through your prayer?

Maybe at the heart of all our traveling is the dream of someday, somehow, getting Home.

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.

Lying to God is like sawing the branch you're sitting on. The better you do it, the harder you fall.

For as long as you remember me, I am never entirely lost.

If our pain doesn't destroy us, it just might transform us into truly human beings at last.

Doubts are the ants in the pants of faith. They keep it awake and moving.

Go where your best prayers take you.

You enter the extraordinary by way of the ordinary

We find by losing. We hold fast by letting go. We become something new by ceasing to be something old.

Nothing human's not a broth of false and true.

Because it is precisely through these stories in all their particularity, as I have long believed and often said, that God makes himself known

If it seems a childish thing to do, do it in remembrance that you are a child.

The trouble with really seeing and really hearing is that then we really have to do something about what we have seen and heard.

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.

One of the blunders religious people are particularly fond of making is the attempt to be more spiritual than God.

A God in the hand is worth two in the bush.

It is out of the absence of God that God makes himself present,

A GLUTTON IS ONE who raids the icebox for a cure for spiritual malnutrition.

Jesus didn't come to merely speak words that were true, He is the Word that makes us true.

Even the saddest things can become, once we have made peace with them, a source of wisdom and strength.

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 ...

It's less the words they say than those they leave unsaid that split old friends apart.

Almost nothing that makes any real difference can be proved.

To believe in God is to give your heart to God.

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.

Faith is stepping out into the unknown with nothing to guide us but a hand just beyond our grasp.

Pay mind to your own life, your own health, and wholeness. A bleeding heart is of no help to anyone if it bleeds to death.

For some people, going to church is going home. In a very profound sense, I would say the same thing. Home is where Christ is.

God himself does not give answers. He gives himself.

Don't let your life just go in one eye and out the other.

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.

I'm not going to spend any time looking into myself the way one who prays does. Maybe that's an even worse mistake than praying might be.

Coincidences are God's way of getting our attention.

Lord, I believe; help my unbelief' is the best any of us can do really, but thank God it is enough.

The pride that keeps us from forgiving is the same pride which keeps us from accepting forgiveness.

Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don't be afraid.

The extraordinary thing that is about to happen is matched only by the extraordinary moment just before it happens. Advent is the name of that moment.

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

There is always the poet, the lunatic, the lover; there is always the religious man who is a queer mixture of the three.

If the truth is worth telling, it is worth making a fool of yourself to tell it.

The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world's hunger meet.

Listen. Your life is happening. You are happening. Think back on your journey. The music of your life ...

[W]e are none of us very good at silence. It says too much.

The past is the place we view the present from as much as the other way around.

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.

We have God's joy in our blood.

Whether you call on him or don't call on him, God will be present with you.

Beneath the worst the world can do, there is always the glimmer of the best.

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.

Where your deep gladness meets with the deep hunger of the world, there you will find a further calling.

Your calling is where your own greatest joy intersects with the needs of the world.

You use your real voice with those you love, and you cannot be phony with those who know you well.

Life without death has become as unthinkable to me as day without night or waking without sleep.

Words spoken in deep love or deep hate set things in motion in the human heart that can never be reversed

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.

A Christian isn't necessarily any nicer than anybody else, just better informed.

The story of any one of us is in some measure the story of us all

Grace is something you can never get but only be given.

Five friends I had and two of them snakes.

People will buy snake oil from anybody who seems to be selling it in a persuasive way.

The sacred moments, the moments of miracle, are often the everyday moments.

The preaching is part of the reason I don't go to church. Plus, I don't know, it was never part of my tradition.

The world speaks of holy things in the only language it knows, which is worldly language.

In New England, especially, [faith] is like sex. It's very personal. You don't bring it out and talk about it.

To be bored is to turn a cold shoulder to engage all that God is and has for you in the moment.

The world says, The more you take, the more you have. Christ says, the more you give, the more you are.

If you want to be holy, be kind.

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.

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.

In his holy flirtation with the world, God occasionally drops a handkerchief. These handkerchiefs are called saints.

Sin and grace, absence and presence, tragedy and comedy, they divide the world between them and where they meet head on, the Gospel happens.