110+ Frederick Buechner Quotes On Peace, Vocation And Freedom

Frederick Buechner was an American Presbyterian minister, theologian, and author. He wrote over thirty books on topics such as theology, fiction, autobiography, and essays. His work has been praised by many, including former President Jimmy Carter, who called him a "brilliant Christian writer." Following is our collection on famous quotes by Frederick Buechner on peace, vocation, freedom.

Top 10 Frederick Buechner Quotes

1. The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.
2. Your vocation in life is where your greatest joy meets the world's greatest need.
3. We find by losing. We hold fast by letting go. We become something new by ceasing to be something old.
4. People are disturbed not by things but by the view they take of them. They may forget what you said, but they will never forget how you made them feel.
5. In his holy flirtation with the world, God occasionally drops a handkerchief. These handkerchiefs are called saints.
6. Pay mind to your own life, your own health, and wholeness. A bleeding heart is of no help to anyone if it bleeds to death.
7. Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don't be afraid.
8. 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.
9. 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.
10. Resurrection means that the worst thing is never the last thing.

Frederick Buechner Image Quotes

A God in the hand is worth two in the bush. — Frederick Buechner

Frederick Buechner Short Quotes

• A God in the hand is worth two in the bush.
• If you want to be holy, be kind.
• For as long as you remember me, I am never entirely lost.
• Go where your best prayers take you.
• the story of any one of us is in some measure the story of us all
• If it seems a childish thing to do, do it in remembrance that you are a child.
• If the truth is worth telling, it is worth making a fool of yourself to tell it.
• Five friends I had and two of them snakes.
• Doubts are the ants in the pants of faith. They keep it awake and moving.
• To remember the past is to see that we are here today by grace, that we have survived as a gift.

Frederick Buechner Quotes About Peace

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. — Frederick Buechner

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. — Frederick Buechner

. . . [T]o live not with hands clenched to grasp, to strike, to hold tight to a life that is always slipping away the more tightly we hold it, but . . . to live with the hands stretched out both to give and receive with gladness. — Frederick Buechner

Even the saddest things can become, once we have made peace with them, a source of wisdom and strength. — Frederick Buechner

Frederick Buechner Quotes About Inspiring

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

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

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

Listen to your life. All moments are key moments. — Frederick Buechner

Frederick Buechner Quotes About Life

Lord, catch me off guard today. Surprise me with some moment of beauty or pain so that at least for the moment, I may be startled into seeing that you are here in all your splendor, always and everywhere, barely hidden, beneath, beyond, within this life I breathe. — Frederick Buechner

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. — Frederick Buechner

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. — Frederick Buechner

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

Stop trying to protect, to rescue, to judge, to manage the lives around you... Remember that the lives of others are not your business. They are their business. They are God's busineess... Even your own life is not your business. It also is God's Business. Leave it to God. — Frederick Buechner

Not to love is, psychically, spiritually, to die. To live for yourself alone, hoarding your life for your own sake, is in almost every sense that matters to reduce your life to a life hardly worth the living, and thus to lose it. — Frederick Buechner

The world needs people who save lives. — Frederick Buechner

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

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

Listen to your life. Listen to what happens to you because it is through what happens to you that God speaks...It's in language that's not always easy to decipher, but it's there powerfully, memorably, unforgettably. — Frederick Buechner

Frederick Buechner Quotes About Live

We must be careful with our lives, for Christ's sake, because it would seem that they are the only lives we are going to have in this puzzling and perilous world, and so they are very precious and what we do with them matters enormously. — Frederick Buechner

Turn around and believe that the good news that we are loved is better than we ever dared hope, and that to believe in that good news, to live out of it and toward it, to be in love with that good news, is of all glad things in this world the gladdest thing of all. Amen, and come Lord Jesus. — Frederick Buechner

And now brothers, I will ask you a terrible question, and God knows I ask it also of myself. Is the truth beyond all truths, beyond the stars, just this: that to live without him is the real death, that to die with him the only life? — Frederick Buechner

The original, shimmering self gets buried so deep that most of us end up hardly living out of it at all. Instead we live out all the other selves, which we are constantly putting on and taking off like coats and hats against the world’s weather — 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. It is to live a life that is always giving itself away and yet is always full. — Frederick Buechner

Many an atheist is a believer without knowing it juast as many a believer is an atheist without knowing it. You can sincerely believe there is no God and live as though there is. You can sincerely believe there is a God and live as though there isn't. — Frederick Buechner

One life on this earth is all that we get, whether it is enough or not enough, and 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

I don't think Christ would give a hoot whether you mentioned Christ to them or not. What matters - I'm speaking arrogantly and absurdly - to him is, are you living the kind of life that I embodied? Whether you believe in Christ or don't, who cares? — Frederick Buechner

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. — Frederick Buechner

Frederick Buechner Quotes About World

... the world can give you these glimpses as well as fairy tales can--the smell of rain, the dazzle of sun on white clapboard with the shadows of ferns and wash on the line, the wildness of a winter storm when in the house the flame of a candle doesn't even flicker. — Frederick Buechner

The kind of work God usually calls you to is the kind of work (a) that you need most to do and (b) that the world most needs to have done....the place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet — Frederick Buechner

Here and there even in our world, and now and then, even in ourselves, we catch glimpeses of a New Creation, which, fleeting as those glipmses are apt to be, give us hope both for this life and for whatever life may await us later on. — Frederick Buechner

Beneath the worst the world can do, there is always the glimmer of the best. — Frederick Buechner

The world says, The more you take, the more you have. Christ says, the more you give, the more you are. — Frederick Buechner

The world speaks of holy things in the only language it knows, which is worldly language. — Frederick Buechner

Like Buddha under the Bo tree, Jesus, on his tree, has his eyes closed too. The difference is this. The pain and sadness of the world that Buddha's eyes close out is the pain and sadness of the world that the eyes of Jesus close in. — Frederick Buechner

Our father. We have killed him, and we will kill him again, and our world will kill him. And yet he is there. It is he who listens at the door. It is he who is coming. It is our father who is about to be born. Through Jesus Christ our Lord. — Frederick Buechner

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. — Frederick Buechner

Your vocation lies in the intersection of the world's deep need and your deep joy. — Frederick Buechner

Frederick Buechner Famous Quotes And Sayings

Faith is better understood as a verb than as a noun, as a process than as a possession. It is an on-again-off-again rather than once-and-for-all. Faith is not being sure where you're going but going anyway. A journey without maps. Tillich says that doubt isn't the opposite of faith; it is an element of faith. — Frederick Buechner

Grace is something you can never get but can only be given. There's no way to earn it or deserve it or bring it about anymore than you can deserve the taste of raspberries and cream or earn good looks. A good night's sleep is grace and so are good dreams. Most tears are grace. The smell of rain is grace. Somebody loving you is grace. — Frederick Buechner

Wherever people love each other and are true to each other and take risks for each other, God is with them and for them and they are doing God's will. — Frederick Buechner

For outlandish creatures like us, on our way to a heart, a brain, and courage, Bethlehem is not the end of our journey but only the beginning - not home but the place through which we must pass if ever we are to reach home at last. — Frederick Buechner

What deadens us most to God's presence within us, I think, is the inner dialogue that we are continually engaged in with ourselves, the endless chatter of human thought. — Frederick Buechner

Religion points to that area of human experience where in one way or another man comes upon mystery as a summons to pilgrimage. — Frederick Buechner

It is not the objective proof of God's existence that we want but the experience of God's presence. That is the miracle we are really after, and that is also, I think, the miracle that we really get. — Frederick Buechner

It is as impossible for man to demonstrate the existence of God as it would be for even Sherlock Holmes to demonstrate the existence of Arthur Conan Doyle. — Frederick Buechner

Faith is homesickness. Faith is a lump in the throat. Faith is less a position on than a movement toward, less a sure thing than a hunch. Faith is waiting. — Frederick Buechner

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

The first ministers were the twelve disciples. There is no evidence that Jesus chose them because they are brighter or nicer than other people. Their sole qualification seems to have been their initial willingness to rise to their feet when Jesus said, "Follow me." — Frederick Buechner

Snobs are people who look down on other people, but that does not justify our looking down on them. Who can say what dark fears of being inferior lurk behind their superior airs or what they suffer in private for the slights they dish out in public? — Frederick Buechner

To be commanded to love God at all, let alone in the wilderness, is like being commanded to be well when we are sick, to sing for joy when we are dying of thirst, to run when our legs are broken. But this is the first and great commandment nonetheless. Even in the wilderness - especially in the wilderness - you shall love him. — Frederick Buechner

Remember Jesus of Nazareth, staggering on broken feet out of the tomb toward the Resurrection, bearing on his body the proud insignia of the defeat which is victory, the magnificent defeat of the human soul at the hands of God. — Frederick Buechner

Of all powers, love is the most powerful and the most powerless. It is the most powerful because it alone can conquer that final and most impregnable stronghold which is the human heart. It is the most powerless because it can do nothing except by consent. — Frederick Buechner

Love yourself not in some egocentric, self-serving sense but love yourself the way you would love your friend in the sense of taking care of yourself, nourishing yourself, trying to understand, comfort, and strengthen yourself. — Frederick Buechner

If you have never known the power of God's love, then maybe it is because you have never asked to know it - I mean really asked, expecting an answer. — Frederick Buechner

The Jesus I follow is the peacemaker, is one who says forgive your enemies, who worries about the poor, who worries about the poorest of the poor instead of the richest of the rich. — Frederick Buechner

He [Jesus] speaks in parables, and though we have approached these parables reverentially all these many years and have heard them expounded as grave and reverent vehicles of holy truth, I suspect that many if not all of them were originally not grave at all but were antic, comic, often more than just a little shocking. — Frederick Buechner

Being a good steward of your pain. . . . It involves being alive to your life. It involves taking the risk of being open, of reaching out, of keeping in touch with the pain as well as the joy of what happens because at no time more than at a painful time do we live out of the depths of who we are instead of out of the shallows. — Frederick Buechner

ON HER DEATHBED, Gertrude Stein is said to have asked, 'What is the answer?' Then, after a long silence, 'What is the question?' Don't start looking in the Bible for the answers it gives. Start by listening for the questions it asks. — Frederick Buechner

The incarnation is “a kind of vast joke whereby the Creator of the ends of the earth comes among us in diapers Until we too have taken the idea of the God-man seriously enough to be scandalized by it, we have not taken it as seriously as it demands to be taken. — Frederick Buechner

Words spoken in deep love or deep hate set things in motion in the human heart that can never be reversed. — Frederick Buechner

When [our secrets] are sad and hurtful secrets, like my father's death, we can in a way honor the hurt by letting ourselves feel it as we never let ourselves feel it before, and then, having felt it, by laying it aside; we can start to take care of ourselves the way we take care of people we love. — Frederick Buechner

If we are to love our neighbors, before doing anything else we must see our neighbors. With our imagination as well as our eyes, that is to say like artists, we must see not just their faces but the life behind and within their faces. Here it is love that is the frame we see them in. — Frederick Buechner

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. — Frederick Buechner

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. — Frederick Buechner

The other day, the way people [do] who are approaching their 80th birthday, I was thinking about all the last business - funerals and where do you want to be buried - and I thought if anything were to be inscribed on my tombstone, I said let it be that. — Frederick Buechner

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. — Frederick Buechner

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

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. — Frederick Buechner

...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. — Frederick Buechner

That's five friends, one each for Jesu's wounds, and Godric bears their mark still on what's left of him as in their time they all bore his on them. What's friendship, when all's done, but the giving and taking of wounds? — Frederick Buechner

I'm not religious in the sense that I do not subscribe to any particular set of religious dogma. I don't go to church. I don't read the Bible. But I believe that the word "Spirit" with a capital S points to an ultimate reality which I give my heart to. — Frederick Buechner

The sacred moments, the moments of miracle, are often the everyday moments. — Frederick Buechner

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

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

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. — Frederick Buechner

If you want to talk about grace, if you want to talk about revelation, talk about your life with some depth, which doesn't mean lurid revelations as much as simply looking at your own deep experiences and describing them as they are. — Frederick Buechner

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. — Frederick Buechner

Like Adam, we have all lost Paradise; and yet we carry Paradise around inside of us in the form of a longing for, almost a memory of, a blessedness that is no more, or the dream of a blessedness that may someday be again. — Frederick Buechner

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

Through the power that memory gives us of thinking, feeling, imagining our way back through time we can at long last finally finish with the past in the sense of removing its power to hurt us and other people and to stunt our growth as human beings. — Frederick Buechner

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

At least to look back over their own lives, as I have looked back over mine, for certain themes and patterns and signals that are so easy to miss when you're caught up in the process of living them. If God speaks to us at all other than through such official channels as the Bible and the church, then I think he speaks to us largely through what happens to us, so listen to what has happened to you-for the sound, above all else, of his voice. — Frederick Buechner

If you talk about sin, you don't have to use the first person singular, but speak out of that part of yourself which knows what it means to become estranged from people you love. Speak in your own voice about things that you in your own life have in one way or another experienced. — Frederick Buechner

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. The ah-h-h-h! that sometimes floats up out of you as out of a Fourth of July crowd when the sky-rocket bursts over the water. The stammer of pain at somebody else's pain. The stammer of joy at somebody else's joy. Whatever words or sounds you use for sighing with over your own life. These are all prayers in their way. These are all spoken not just to yourself but to something even more familiar than yourself and even more strange than the world. — Frederick Buechner

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

Gail Godwin has written a book about the heaviest matters of loss, grief, and loneliness with a touch so light that I was as often deeply amused by it as I was deeply moved. — Frederick Buechner

The best moments any of us have as human beings are those moments when for a little while it is possible to escape the squirrel-cage of being me into the landscape of being us. — Frederick Buechner

There is a fragrance in the air, a certain passage of a song, an old photograph falling out from the pages of a book, the sound of somebody's voice in the hall that makes your heart leap and fills your eyes with tears. Who can say when or how it will be that something easters up out of the dimness to remind us of a time before we were born and after we will die? — Frederick Buechner

And there are other dangers potentially more dangerous than even nuclear war. There is AIDS. There is terrorism. There are drugs and more to the point the darkness of our time that makes people seek escape in drugs. There is the slow poisoning of what we call "the environment" of all things as if with that absurdly antiseptic phrase we can conceal from ourselves that what we are really poisoning is home, is here, is us. — Frederick Buechner

Part of the inner world of everyone is this sense of emptiness, unease, incompleteness, and I believe that this in itself is a word from God, that this is the sound that God’s voice makes in a world that has explained him away. In such a world, I suspect that maybe God speaks to us most clearly through his silence, his absence, so that we know him best through our missing him. — Frederick Buechner

There is no event so common place but that God is present within it, always hidden, always leaving you room to recognize Him or not to recognize Him. — Frederick Buechner

To be wise is to be eternally curious. — Frederick Buechner

God doesn't reveal his grand design. He reveals Himself. — Frederick Buechner

The difference to me is not between the believers on one hand and the nonbelievers on the other hand. It's between people who carry in their hearts some sense of what the word "God," at least to me, means, which is a loving, creating, everlastingly renewing presence deeply concerned with the well-being of the earth and all its creatures. — Frederick Buechner

Justice is the grammar of things. Mercy is the poetry of things. — Frederick Buechner

My prayer is spasmodic, occasional, desperate. It has a great deal to do with my children's physical well-being - that when they're traveling in the air the plane not crash, things like that. — Frederick Buechner

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

Coincidences are God's way of getting our attention. — 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

I was deeply influenced by an Episcopal laywoman named Agnes Sanford, who in her day was quite famous as a faith healer, which is a term I've always distrusted, because it conjures up charlatanry. She was not a charlatan. She was the real thing, and she had had remarkable healings. — Frederick Buechner

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

Life Lessons by Frederick Buechner

1. Frederick Buechner teaches us to recognize the sacred in everyday moments, to be open to the mystery of life, and to find joy in the small things.
2. He encourages us to be aware of our own stories and to listen to the stories of others, to be compassionate and generous in our interactions with people, and to always strive for justice.
3. He reminds us that life is a journey, and that we should strive to live with intention and purpose, and to make the most of the time we have.