Quotes by Frederick Buechner
Frederick Buechner (1926–2022) — Schriftsteller, Theologe und Pfarrer · presbyterianisch · USA
Carl Frederick Buechner (1926–2022) war ein US-amerikanischer Schriftsteller, Theologe und presbyterianischer Pfarrer, der überwiegend im US-Bundesstaat Vermont lebte und wirkte. Bekannt wurde er durch Romane, Memoiren und theologische Essays, in denen er Gottes Gnade und Gegenwart mitten in alltäglichen Brüchen, Schmerz und Zweifeln thematisierte. Für Bibelleser heute eröffnet sein Werk einen literarisch feinsinnigen Zugang zu biblischen Texten, der existenzielle Verwundbarkeit ernst nimmt, auch wenn sein erzählerischer Ansatz mitunter Kritik an mangelnder dogmatischer Strenge aufwarf.
Era: Today
Recurring topics: Meaning & Identity, Faith & Trust, Wisdom & Understanding, Joy & Gratitude, Grace & Redemption, Doubt & Hard Questions, Guidance & God's Will, Service & Love of Neighbour
Quotes by Frederick Buechner
The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet.
Frederick Buechner
Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don't be afraid.
Frederick Buechner
A good sleep is grace and so are good dreams. Most tears are grace. The smell of rain is grace. Somebody loving you is grace. Loving somebody is grace.
Frederick Buechner
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.
Frederick Buechner
The extraordinary thing that is about to happen is matched only by the extraordinary moment just before it happens. Advent is the name of that moment.
Frederick Buechner
'Lord, I believe; help my unbelief' is the best any of us can do really, but thank God it is enough.
Frederick Buechner
Doubts are the ants in the pants of faith. They keep it awake and moving.
Frederick Buechner
Compassion is the sometimes fatal capacity for feeling what it's like to live inside somebody else's skin. It's 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
It is as impossible for us to demonstrate the existence of God as it would be for even Sherlock Holmes to demonstrate the existence of Arthur Conan Doyle.
Frederick Buechner
God himself does not give answers. He gives himself.
Frederick Buechner
A Christian is one who is on the way, though not necessarily very far along it, and who has at least some dim and half-baked idea of whom to thank.
Frederick Buechner
Lust is the craving for salt of a person who is dying of thirst.
Frederick Buechner
Maybe more than anything else, to be a saint is to know joy. Not happiness that comes and goes with the moments that occasion it, but joy that is always there like an underground spring no matter how dark and terrible the night.
Frederick Buechner
To be a saint is to live not with the hands clenched to grasp, to strike, to hold tight to a life that is always slipping away the more tightly we hold it; but it is to live with the hands stretched out both to give and to receive with gladness.
Frederick Buechner
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.
Frederick Buechner
Words spoken in deep love or deep hate set things in motion within the human heart that can never be reversed.
Frederick Buechner
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.
Frederick Buechner
Faith is stepping out into the unknown with nothing to guide us but a hand just beyond our grasp.
Frederick Buechner
Sin and grace, absence and presence, tragedy and comedy, they divide the world between them and where they meet head on, the Gospel happens.
Frederick Buechner
Either life is holy with meaning, or life doesn't mean a damn thing.
Frederick Buechner
Go where your best prayers take you.
Frederick Buechner
Maybe it is all utterly meaningless. Maybe it is all unutterably meaningful. If you want to know which, pay attention.
Frederick Buechner
Faith is a way of waiting—never quite knowing, never quite hearing or seeing, because in the darkness we are all but a little lost.
Frederick Buechner
There is doubt hard on the heels of every belief, fear hard on the heels of every hope, and many holy things lie in ruins because the world has ruined them and we have ruined them.
Frederick Buechner
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
Remember me not for the ill I've done but for the good I've dreamed.
Frederick Buechner
Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery that it is.
Frederick Buechner
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.
Frederick Buechner
God speaks through the hieroglyphics of the things that happen to us.
Frederick Buechner
If there is such a thing at all, holiness is Godness and as such is not something people do but something God does in them if there is such a thing as God.
Frederick Buechner
I have come to believe that by and large the human family all has the same secrets, which are both very telling and very important to tell.
Frederick Buechner
Faith waits even so, delivered at least from that final despair which gives up waiting altogether because it sees nothing left worth waiting for.
Frederick Buechner
A Christian isn't necessarily any nicer than anybody else. Just better informed.
Frederick Buechner
The story of any one of us is in some measure the story of us all.
Frederick Buechner
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.
Frederick Buechner
The storyteller's claim is that life has meaning.
Frederick Buechner
Nothing human's not a broth of false and true.
Frederick Buechner
Nothing is harder to make real than holiness.
Frederick Buechner
Sources: wikipedia.org, americamagazine.org, thegospelcoalition.org, ethicsandculture.com
All quotes · lumen.bible