77 Best Frederick Buechner Quotes From The American Author And Theologian

Frederick Buechner is a famous theologian and a preacher.

He has written more than thirty books which influenced many people. 'Secrets In The Dark' and 'The Magnificient Defeat' are some of his popular works.

His novel titled 'Godric' was a finalist for the coveted Pulitzer prize in 1981. His concept states that your inner peace is connected deeply with the world's need. The following quotes are some of his best quotes if you want to know more about the eternal being.

If you like this article about Frederick Buechner quotes, you may also want to check our other quotes articles on Anne Lamott quotes and [William Wordsworth quotes].

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Best Frederick Buechner Quotes

Here are some quotes of Frederick Buechner about marriage and Frederick Buechner quotes about vocation.

1. "I find I need to put things into words before I can believe that they are entirely real."

- Frederick Buechner.

2. “It is within the bonds of marriage that I, for one, found a greater freedom to be and to become and to share myself."

- Frederick Buechner.

3. "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."

- Frederick Buechner.

4. "Maybe at the heart of all our traveling is the dream of someday, somehow, getting home."

- Frederick Buechner.

5. “Justice is the grammar of things. Mercy is the poetry of things.”

- Frederick Buechner.

6. “I not only have my secrets, I am my secrets. And you are yours."

- Frederick Buechner.

7. "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."

- Frederick Buechner.

8. "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.

9. “You enter the extraordinary by way of the ordinary”

- Frederick Buechner.

10. "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.

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

- Frederick Buechner.

12. “You have to suffer in order to be beautiful.”

- Frederick Buechner.

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

- Frederick Buechner.

14. “Compassion is sometimes the fatal capacity for feeling what it is like to live inside somebody else's skin."

- Frederick Buechner.

15. "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.

16. “Of the Seven Deadly Sins, anger is possibly the most fun."

- Frederick Buechner.

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

- Frederick Buechner.

18. "It is a truth that, for twenty centuries, people 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.

19. “Beneath our clothes, our reputations, our pretensions, beneath our religion or lack of it, we are all vulnerable both to the storm without and to the storm within.”

- Frederick Buechner.

20. “The magic of words is that they have power to do more than convey meaning; not only do they have the power to make things clear, they make things happen.”

- Frederick Buechner.

21. “Maybe the truth of it is that it’s too good not to be true.”

- Frederick Buechner.

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

- Frederick Buechner.

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

- Frederick Buechner.

24. "Our stories are all stories of searching. We search for a good self to be and for good work to do."

- Frederick Buechner.

25. "If so much as a single one of you were missing, there would be an empty place at the great feast of life that nobody else in all creation could fill.”

- Frederick Buechner.

26. "One life on this earth is all that we get. Whether it is enough or not enough."

- Frederick Buechner.

27. "The chief drawback of anger is that what you are wolfing down is yourself.”

- Frederick Buechner.

28. “Of all powers, love is the most powerful and the most powerless.

- Frederick Buechner.

29. “The power of stories is that they are telling us that life adds us somehow, that life itself is like a story.”

- Frederick Buechner.

30. "Toleration is often just indifference in disguise."

- Frederick Buechner.

31. "Joy is a mystery because it can happen anywhere, anytime."

- Frederick Buechner.

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

- Frederick Buechner.

Famous Frederick Buechner Quotes

Here are some famous quotes by Frederick Buechner.

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

- Frederick Buechner.

34. “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."

- Frederick Buechner.

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

- Frederick Buechner.

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

- Frederick Buechner.

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

- Frederick Buechner.

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

- Frederick Buechner.

39. "To savour to the last toothsome morsel both the pain you are given and the pain you are giving back—in many ways, anger is a feast fit for a king."

- Frederick Buechner.

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

- Frederick Buechner.

41. "The obvious conclusion would seem to be that at the very least we are fools if we do not live it as fully and bravely and beautifully as we can."

- Frederick Buechner.

42. “The extraordinary thing that is about to happen is matched only by the extraordinary moment just before it happens."

- Frederick Buechner.

43. "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.

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

- Frederick Buechner.

45. "Compassion 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.

46. "We search to become human in a world that tempts us always to be less than human or looks to us to be more. We search to love and to be loved."

- Frederick Buechner.

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

- Frederick Buechner.

48. "The fearsome blessing of that hard time continues to work itself out in my life in the same way we're told the universe is still hurtling through outer space under the impact of the great cosmic explosion."

- Frederick Buechner.

49. "Find joy even under the most unpromising circumstances, even in the midst of suffering, with tears in its eyes."

- Frederick Buechner.

50. "Almost nothing that makes any real difference can be proved."

- Frederick Buechner.

Frederick Buechner Quotes On God

Here are some Frederick Buechner quotes on grace.

51. "The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world of deep hunger meet."

- Frederick Buechner.

52. “Wherever people love each other and are true to each other and take risks for each other. God is with them.”

- Frederick Buechner.

53. "There's something about the way he carries his head, his hands, the way he carries his cross—the way he carries me."

- Frederick Buechner.

54. "They are prepared for a mustard-seed kingdom of God no bigger than the eye of a newt but not for the great banyan it becomes with birds in its branches singing Mozart."

- Frederick Buechner.

55. “Faith is not being sure where you’re going but going anyway.”

- Frederick Buechner.

56. "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."

- Frederick Buechner.

57. "Go where your best prayers take you."

- Frederick Buechner.

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

- Frederick Buechner.

59. "...If you want to know who you are, watch your feet. Because where your feet take you, that is who you are."

- Frederick Buechner.

60. "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."

- Frederick Buechner.

61. "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."

- Frederick Buechner.

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

- Frederick Buechner.

63. "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."

- Frederick Buechner.

64. "In a world where it is often hard to believe in much of anything, we search to believe in something holy and beautiful and life-transcending that will give meaning and purpose to the lives we live."

- Frederick Buechner.

65. "If he wants us to love him, then we must be left free not to love him—we are free to resist it, deny it, crucify it finally, which we do again and again."

- Frederick Buechner.

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

- Frederick Buechner.

67. “If there is anything in this world I believe, it is that God is indeed doing all kinds of things in the lives of all of us.”

- Frederick Buechner.

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

- Frederick Buechner.

69. “Everybody prays whether you think of it as praying or not. The odd silence you fall into when something very beautiful is happening or something very good or very bad.”

- Frederick Buechner.

70. "They are prepared for a God who strikes hard bargains but not for a God who gives as much for an hour's work as for a day's."

- Frederick Buechner.

71. "The kind of work God usually calls you to is the kind of work that you need most to do and that the world most needs to have done."

- Frederick Buechner.

72. "I think grace sometimes explodes into our lives -sending our pain, terror, astonishment hurtling through inner space until he gives us our bearings, to bring us into something like full being at last."

- Frederick Buechner.

73. "Our terrible freedom, which he refuses to overpower so that, in this, the greatest of all powers, God's power, is itself powerless."

- Frederick Buechner.

74. “God himself does not give answers. He gives himself.”

- Frederick Buechner.

75. “Disbelief is as much of a choice as belief is."

- Frederick Buechner.

76. "The real turning point in human history is less apt to be the day the wheel is invented or Rome falls than the day a Jesus is born."

- Frederick Buechner.

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

- Frederick Buechner.

Here at Kidadl, we have carefully created lots of interesting family-friendly quotes for everyone to enjoy! If you liked our suggestions for  Frederick Buechner quotes then why not take a look at [Fran Lebowitz] and Gertrude Stein quotes.

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