Frederick Buechner Quotes

82 Sourced Quotes

Faith is the assurance that the best and holiest dream is true after all.

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

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

Frederick Buechner
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
Justice is the grammar of things. Mercy is the poetry of things.

Frederick Buechner
What's lost is nothing to what's found, and all the death that ever was, set next to life, would scarcely fill a cup.

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

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

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

Frederick Buechner
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. A good night's sleep is grace and so are good dreams. Most tears are grace. The smell of rain is grace. Somebody loving you is grace.

Frederick Buechner
In a world where there are no longer books we have almost all of us read, the movies we have almost all of us seen are perhaps the richest cultural bond we have. They go on haunting us for years the way our dreams go on haunting us. In a way they are our dreams. The best of them remind us of human truths that would not seem as true without them. They help to remind us that we are all of us humans together.

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

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

Frederick Buechner
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
All 'isms' run out in the end, and good riddance to most of them. Patriotism for example. [...] If in the interest of making sure we don't blow ourselves off the map once and for all, we end up relinquishing a measure of national sovereignty to some international body, so much the worse for national sovereignty. There is only one Sovereignty that matters ultimately, and it is of another sort altogether.

Frederick Buechner
The 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 changed with new significance.

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

Frederick Buechner
Faith is homesickness. Faith is a lump in the throat. Faith is less a position on than a movement toward, less a sure thing than a hunch. Faith is waiting.

Frederick Buechner
Without somehow destroying me in the process, how could God reveal himself in a way that would leave no room for doubt? If there were no room for doubt, there would be no room for me.

Frederick Buechner
Lust is the craving for salt of a man who is dying of thirst.

Frederick Buechner
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
We learn to praise God not by paying compliments but by paying attention.

Frederick Buechner