Frederick Buechner Quotes

Five friends I had and two of them snakes.

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

God himself does not give answers. He gives himself.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

True faith, a simple life, a helping hand- the three things prized most in Heaven.

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.

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

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

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.

What makes you, in the deepest sense of the word, happy? That's what you should be doing, if the other part is also met - if it is something the world needs.

If we are a people who pray, darkness is apt to be a lot of what our prayers are about. If we are people who do not pray, it is apt to be darkness in one form or another that has stopped our mouths.

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

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

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

To be wise is to be eternally curious.

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

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

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

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.

My story is important not because it is mine, God knows, but because if I tell it anything like right, the chances are you will recognize that in many ways it is also yours.

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

Despair has been called the unforgivable sin-not presumably because God refuses to forgive it, but because it despairs of the possibility of being forgiven.

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

...words are in a way our godly sharing in the work of creation, and the speaking and writing of words is at once the most human and the most holy business we engage in.

Theology, like fiction, is largely autobiographical.

Faith is not being sure where you're going, but going anyway.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

We have God's joy in our blood.

Faith in God is less apt to proceed from miracles than miracles from faith in God.

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.

Toleration is often just indifference in disguise.

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

It's all so verbal in the Protestant church. You've heard these words a million times before. Maybe people are leaving the church because they find the church has nothing that they're looking for.

God in his unending greatness and glory and man in his unending littleness, prepared for the worst but rarely for the best, prepared for the possible but rarely for the impossible.

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

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

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.