42 Frederick Buechner Quotes

Search within the 42 Frederick Buechner Quotes
42
It is impossible to conceive how different things would have turned out if that birth had not happened whenever, wherever, however it did ... for millions of people who have lived since, the birth of Jesus made possible not just a new way of understanding life but a new way of living it. It is a truth that, for twenty centuries, there have been untold numbers of men and women who, in untold numbers of ways, have been so grasped by the child who was born, so caught up in the message he taught and the life he lived, that they have found themselves profoundly changed by their relationship with him.
- Frederick Buechner
13

41
Many an atheist is a believer without knowing it just 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
7




40
Doubts are the ants in the pants of faith. They keep it awake and moving.
- Frederick Buechner
4

39
If you want to be holy, be kind.
- Frederick Buechner
4

38
Compassion is sometimes the fatal capacity for feeling what it is like to live inside somebody else's skin. It is the knowledge that there can never really be any peace and joy for me until there is peace and joy finally for you too.
- Frederick Buechner
4




37
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.
- Frederick Buechner
2

36
Laugh till you weep. Weep till there's nothing left but to laugh at your weeping. In the end it's all one.
- Frederick Buechner
2

35
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.
- Frederick Buechner
2

34
It is not the objective proof of God's existence that we want but the experience of God's presence. That is the miracle we are really after, and that is also, I think, the miracle that we really get.
- Frederick Buechner
2

33
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 bridge.
- Frederick Buechner
2

32
Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom," the good thief said from his cross (Luke 23:42). There are perhaps no more human words in all of Scripture, no prayer we can pray so well.
- Frederick Buechner
1

31
The place God calls you to is where your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet.
- Frederick Buechner
1

30
Of the Seven Deadly Sins, anger is possibly the most fun. To lick your wounds, to smack your lips over grievances long past ... to savor to the last toothsome morsel both the pain you are given and the pain you are giving back -- in many ways it is a feast fit for a king. The chief drawback is that what you are wolfing down is yourself. The skeleton at the feast is you.
- Frederick Buechner
1

29
The sacred moments, the moments of miracle, are often the everyday moments, the moments which, if we do not look with more than our eyes or listen with more than our ears reveal only...a gardener, a stranger coming down the road behind us, a meal like any other meal. But if we look with our hearts, if we listen with all our being and imagination... what we may see is Jesus himself.
- Frederick Buechner
1

28
You can survive on your own; you can grow strong on your own; you can prevail on your own; but you cannot become human on your own.
- Frederick Buechner
1

27
Coincidences are God's way of getting our attention.
- Frederick Buechner
1

26
If you were aware of how precious today is, you could hardly live through it. Unless you are aware of how precious it is, you can hardly be said to be living at all.
- Frederick Buechner
1

25
If preachers decide to preach about hope, let them preach out of what they themselves hope for.
- Frederick Buechner
1

24
To be commanded to love God at all, let alone in the wilderness, is like being commanded to be well when we are sick, to sing for joy when we are dying of thirst, to run when our legs are broken. But this is the first and great commandment nonetheless. Even in the wilderness - especially in the wilderness - you shall love him.
- Frederick Buechner
1




23
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
0

22
It's less the words they say than those they leave unsaid that split old friends apart.
- Frederick Buechner
0

21
In the long run, there can be no joy for anybody until there is joy finally for us all.
- Frederick Buechner
0

20
If we are to love our neighbors, before doing anything else we must see our neighbors. With our imagination as well as our eyes, that is to say like artists, we must see not just their faces but the life behind and within their faces. Here it is love that is the frame we see them in.
- Frederick Buechner
0

19
Romantic love is blind to everything except what is lovable and lovely, but Christ's love sees us with terrible clarity and sees us whole. Christ's love so wishes our joy that it is ruthless against everything in us that diminishes our joy. The worst sentence Love can pass is that we behold the suffering which Love has endured for our sake, and that is also our acquittal. The justice and mercy of the judge are ultimately one.
- Frederick Buechner
0

18
The life that I touch for good or ill will touch another life, and that in turn another, until who knows where the trembling stops or in what far place my touch will be felt.
- Frederick Buechner
0

17
Your life and my life flow into each other as wave flows into wave, and unless there is peace and joy and freedom for you, there can be no real peace or joy or freedom for me. To see reality--not as we expect it to be but as it is--is to see that unless we live for each other and in and through each other, we do not really live very satisfactorily; that there can really be life only where there really is, in just this sense, love.
- Frederick Buechner
0

16
We must be careful with our lives, for Christ's sake, because it would seem that they are the only lives we are going to have in this puzzling and perilous world, and so they are very precious and what we do with them matters enormously.
- Frederick Buechner
0

15
[T]he Gospel writers are not really interested primarily in the facts of the birth but in the significance, the meaning for them of that birth just as the people who love us are not really interested primarily in the facts of our births but in what it meant to them when we were born and how for them the world was never the same again, how their whole lives were charged with new significance.
- Frederick Buechner
0

14
Martin Luther said once, 'If I were God, I'd kick the world to pieces.' But Martin Luther wasn't God. God is God, and God has never kicked the world to pieces. He keeps re-entering the world. He keeps offering himself to the world by grace, keeps somehow blessing the world, making possible a kind of life which we all, in our deepest being, hunger for.
- Frederick Buechner
0

13
Grace is something you can never get but can only be given. There's no way to earn it or deserve it or bring it about anymore than you can deserve the taste of raspberries and cream or earn good looks.
- Frederick Buechner
0

12
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
0

11
To journey for the sake of saving our own lives is little by little to cease to live in any sense that really matters, even to ourselves, because it is only by journeying for the world's sake - even when the world bores and sickens and scares you half to death - that little by little we start to come alive.
- Frederick Buechner
0

10
If you forget me, one of the ways I remember who I am will be gone. If you forget me, part of who I am will be gone.
- Frederick Buechner
0

9
Believing in him is not the same as believing things about him such as that he was born of a virgin and raised Lazarus from the dead. Instead, it is a matter of giving our hearts to him, of come hell or high water putting our money on him, the way a child believes in a mother or a father, the way a mother or a father believes in a child.
- Frederick Buechner
0

8
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
0

7
The original, shimmering self gets buried so deep that most of us end up hardly living out of it at all. Instead we live out all the other selves, which we are constantly putting on and taking off like coats and hats against the world's weather.
- Frederick Buechner
0

6
I not only have my secrets, I am my secrets. And you are yours. Our secrets are human secrets, and our trusting each other enough to share them with each other has much to do with the secret of what it means to be human.
- Frederick Buechner
0

5
Go where your best prayers take you.
- Frederick Buechner
0

4
The only patriots worth their salt are the ones who love their country enough to see that in a nuclear age it is not going to survive unless the world survives. True patriots are no longer champions of Democracy, Communism, or anything like that but champions of the Human Race.
- Frederick Buechner
0

3
Avarice, greed, concupiscence and so forth are all based on the mathematical truism that the more you get, the more you have. The remark of that it is more blessed to give than to receive is based on the human truth that the more you give away in love, the more you are. It is not just for the sake of other people that tells us to give rather than get, but for our own sakes too.
- Frederick Buechner
0

2
In his holy flirtation with the world, God occasionally drops a handkerchief. These handkerchiefs are called saints.
- Frederick Buechner
0

1
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
0

Total Quotes Found: 42