Frederick Buechner Quotes

I remember, for instance, the first time I went to the great palace of Versailles outside Paris and ...

Theology, like fiction, is largely autobiographical.

You use your real voice with those you love, and you cannot be phony with those who know you well.

The grace of God means something like: Here is your life. You might never have been, but you are bec...

With words as valueless as poker chips, we play games whose object it is to keep us from seeing each...

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

Compassion is the sometimes fatal capacity for feeling what it is like to live inside somebody else'...

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

Vocation” comes from the Latin vocare (to call) and means the work a man is called to by God.There a...

From the simplest lyric to the most complex novel, literature is asking us to pay attention. Pay att...

Maybe it's all utterly meaningless. Maybe it's all unutterably meaningful. If you want to know which...

Pay mind to your own life, your own health, and wholeness. A bleeding heart is of no help to anyone ...

You can kiss your family and friends good-bye and put miles between you, but at the same time you ca...

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

Go where your best prayers take you.

Compassion is sometimes the fatal capacity for feeling what it is like to live inside somebody else'...

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

From the essay on Love, in which he describes as a wilderness experience his daily visits with his w...

The time is ripe for looking back over the day, the week, the year, and trying to figure out where w...

...With a religious book it is less what we see in it than what we see through it that matters. J. R...

To be commanded to love God at all, let alone in the wilderness, is like being commanded to be well ...

Words written fifty years ago, a hundred years ago, a thousand years ago, can have as much of this p...

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

Many an atheist is a believer without knowing it juast as many a believer is an atheist without know...

What's prayer? It's shooting shafts into the dark. What mark they strike, if any, who's to say? It's...

If we are a people who pray, darkness is apt to be a lot of what our prayers are about. If we are pe...

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

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

It is more than just memory, I think, that binds us to the past. The past is the place we view the p...

Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery it is. In the boredom and pain of it, no less...

Matthew lists Rahab as one of the ancestresses of the Lord Jesus Christ (Matthew 1:5), and that may ...

We are above all things loved--that is the good news of the gospel--and loved not just the way we tu...

God knows we have our own demons to be cast out, our own uncleanness to be cleansed. Neurotic anxiet...

I believe that whether we recognize him or not, or believe in him or not, or even know his name, aga...

You have to suffer in order to be beautiful.

Remember that the lives of other people are not your business. They are their business. They are God...

If writers write not just with paper and ink or a word processor but with their own life's blood, th...

The sadness was I'd lost a father I had never fully found. It's like a tune that ends before you've ...

Is it true, what Jesus believed, this Truth that he died for and lived for? Maybe the only way to kn...

My story is important not because it is mine, God knows, but because if I tell it anything like righ...

Maybe the most sacred function of memory is just that: to render the distinction between past, prese...

At least for a moment we all saw, I think, that the danger of pluralism is that it becomes factional...

Sin and grace, absence and presence, tragedy and comedy, they divide the world between them and wher...

... the preacher speaks both the word of tragedy and the word of comedy because they are both of the...

In answer, the news of the Gospel is that extraordinary things happen. ... Lear goes berserk on a he...

They are prepared for a God who strikes hard bargains but not for a God who gives as much for an hou...

Let the preacher tell the truth. Let him make audible the silence of the news of the world with the ...

There is a fragrance in the air, a certain passage of a song, an old photograph falling out from the...

Here and there and not just in books we catch glimpses of a world of once upon a time and they lived...

... the world can give you these glimpses as well as fairy tales can--the smell of rain, the dazzle ...

God in his unending greatness and glory and man in his unending littleness, prepared for the worst b...

God is the comic shepherd who gets more of a kick out of that one lost sheep once he finds it again ...

The fatted calf, the best Scotch, the hoedown could all have been his too, any time he asked for the...

[W]e are none of us very good at silence. It says too much.

Every person has one particular time in his life when he is more beautiful than he is ever going to ...

Life is grace. Sleep is forgiveness. The night absolves. Darkness wipes the slate clean, not spotles...

I hold my plush monkey over the bannister and let it drop. Its eyes light up when you squeeze its ki...

A miracle is when the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. A miracle is when one plus one equ...

Turn around and believe that the good news that we are loved is better than we ever dared hope, and ...

It hardly matters how the body of Jesus came to be missing because in the last analysis what convinc...

Once we have seen Him in a stable, we can never be sure where He will appear or to what lengths he w...

War is hell, but sometimes in the midst of that hell men do things that heaven itself must be proud ...

The Gospel writers are not really interested primarily in the facts of the birth but in the signific...

And because God's love is uncoercive and treasures our freedom - if above all he wants us to love hi...

If we are to believe he is really alive with all that that implies, then we have to believe without ...

Remember Jesus of Nazareth, staggering on broken feet out of the tomb toward the Resurrection, beari...

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

Our father. We have killed him, and we will kill him again, and our world will kill him. And yet he ...

Like Adam, we have all lost Paradise; and yet we carry Paradise around inside of us in the form of a...

And now brothers, I will ask you a terrible question, and God knows I ask it also of myself. Is the ...

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

For outlandish creatures like us, on our way to a heart, a brain, and courage, Bethlehem is not the ...

If you have never known the power of God's love, then maybe it is because you have never asked to kn...

There is always the poet, the lunatic, the lover; there is always the religious man who is a queer m...

In honesty you have to admit to a wise man that prayer is not for the wise, not for the prudent, not...

We are children, perhaps, at the very moment when we know that it is as children that God loves us -...

It is not objective proof of God's existence that we want but, whether we use religious language for...

It was the upward-reaching and fathomlessly hungering, heart-breaking love for the beauty of the wor...

To do for yourself the best that you have it in you to do—to grit your teeth and clench your fists i...

The Shield was another of the Fear's names. According to Laughter, it means he shields the seed of A...

If we are to love our neighbors, before doing anything else we must see our neighbors. With our imag...

Unbelief is as much of a choice as belief is. What makes it in many ways more appealing is that wher...

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

More than the painting you see or the music you hear, the words you read become in the very act of r...

Principles are what people have instead of God.To be a Christian means among other things to be will...

To confess your sins to God is not to tell God anything God doesn't already know. Until you confess ...

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

The real turning point in human history is less apt to be the day the wheel is invented or Rome fall...

The contradiction is resolved when you realize that for Jesus peace seems to have meant not the abse...