Frederick Buechner Quotes – Finding Wisdom and Inspiration
Doubts are the ants in the pants of faith.
You have to give up what you have in order to get what you want.
The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.
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.
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.
Faith is different from belief. Belief is passive. Faith is active.
Your vocation in life is where your greatest passion meets the world’s greatest need.
Laughter is salt: it preserves the good and disarms the bad.
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.
The life 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.
You can kiss your family and friends good-bye and put miles between you, but at the same time you carry them with you in your heart, your mind, your stomach, because you do not just live in a world but a world lives in you.
You never know what may cause tears. The sight of the Atlantic Ocean can do it, or a piece of music, or a face you’ve never seen before. A pair of somebody’s old shoes can do it. Almost any movie made before the great sadness that came over the world after the Second World War, a horse cantering across a meadow, the high school basketball team running out onto the gym floor at the start of a game. You can never be sure. But of this you can be sure. Whenever you find tears in your eyes, especially unexpected tears, it is well to pay the closest attention.
When you remember me, it means that you have carried something of who I am with you, that I have left some mark of who I am on who you are. It means that you can summon me back to your mind even though countless years and miles may stand between us. It means that if we meet again, you will know me. It means that even after I die, you can still see my face and hear my voice and speak to me in your heart.
The story of any one of us is in some measure the story of us all.
Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don’t be afraid.
Unfulfilled longing is usually a better peg for hanging a character than what is fulfilled.
Innocence is a kind of insanity.
Pride is the recognition of the fact that you are your own god.
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.
The truth is that when it comes to faith, it is a matter of seeing whatever there is to be seen, and of growing to see what there is to be seen.
If you don’t believe in God, then your God is someone who doesn’t have the decency to exist.
You can run ten thousand miles and still not reach ecstasy. Or peace of mind.
If they want God, let them find him.
God can’t break His promise. Only we can, and we do, but even so, there’s always more than mercy waiting for us.
The Gospel is to put it simply, about who God is and what we see God doing. Check it out.
God acts in history, but history is just history.
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.
Theology, like life itself, is a matter of looking back with wonder.
The right things happen and the right people show up, but they don’t last because Irvine always keeps moving.
I wandered away to the horizon, I came back home, and now I wander away in my mind, a thousand miles away.
This way. I said again, mashing his head. He lolled and tried to get up, but his legs seemed weak.
Christ’s birth is the sunrise, the dawn of grace in your life.
I believe that grace wakes us up, holds us up, and sleeks and pokes and abashes us endearingly until, by degrees, Bonnie, Faith, and children come back to our lives.
What I want you to notice is that the graces of my life are almost never planned but come. Christmas began with the birth of a baby nobody counted on.
Grace crashes in upon every life like an ocean wave.
There is God’s voice, and you go where you go to find it in whatever way that works.
Events have no significance if we do not appreciate Him as an actor.
A good-enough pastor is better than none.
Love and laughter are the transformative agents of change for good things in the world.
A House for Hope is a repository for your love and prayers about Iowa’s faith community.
All during that time God had his eye on me, just as when the need arose he had his eye on the baby in the rags.
We have laughed together and loved together, listened, traveled, celebrated, mourned, worked, healed, worshipped, buried friends and enemies alike.
We call it recollected childhood because in using that phrase we call back our first innocence and the world we had it in, even though we never was innocence enough for it and in the world’s return he brings back in dog and bird and fountain far-off hili of sand bags along the front.
From divinity to diapers is DURTY work, but it’s the work of God, and a masterpiece in the process.
When I think of where I got my first education in books and people and God, Wisconsin was it.
Love is the result of balance and of self-love. Love is the bottom line.
Most of all they will teach us that we are born to love and never truly die.
It is a whole new world with a lot of movement.
The baby Jesus can make you jump and shout.
Grace and mercy are yours for the asking.