Frederick Buechner Quotes

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

Your vocation in life is where your greatest joy meets the world's greatest need.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

Resurrection means that the worst thing is never the last thing.

Life is grace. Sleep is forgiveness. The night absolves. Darkness wipes the slate clean, not spotless to be sure, but clean enough for another day's chalking.

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

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.

Joy is a mystery because it can happen anywhere, anytime, even under the most unpromising circumstances, even in the midst of suffering, with tears in its eyes.

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

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.

If you want to be holy, be kind.

Religion points to that area of human experience where in one way or another man comes upon mystery as a summons to pilgrimage.

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.

People are disturbed not by things but by the view they take of them. They may forget what you said, but they will never forget how you made them feel.

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.

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

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.

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.

The birth of Jesus made possible not just a new way of understanding life but a new way of living it.

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

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

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.

The world needs people who save lives.

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

Go where your best prayers take you.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

Listen to your life. All moments are key moments.

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

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.

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

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

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.

Five friends I had and two of them snakes.

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

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.

To be a saint is to be a little out of one's mind, which is a very good thing to be a little out of from time to time. It is to live a life that is always giving itself away and yet is always full.