Top 200 Frederick Buechner Quotes (2025 Update)

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

— Frederick Buechner

Featured in: Positive Inspirational Quotes, Meaning Quotes, Short Inspirational Quotes, Spiritual Growth Quotes, Fulfillment Quotes

2. “Your vocation in life is where your greatest joy meets the world’s greatest need.”

— Frederick Buechner

Featured in: Impact Quotes, Meaning Quotes, Fulfillment Quotes, Career Development Quotes, Purpose Quotes

3. “Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don’t be afraid.”

— Frederick Buechner

Featured in: Fear Quotes, Quotes About the World

4. “Resurrection means that the worst thing is never the last thing.”

— Frederick Buechner

Featured in: Resilience Quotes, Easter Quotes

5. “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

Featured in: Enjoy Life Quotes, Intention Quotes, Carpe Diem Quotes, Life is Beautiful Quotes

6. “Vocation is the place where the world’s greatest need and a person’s greatest joy meet.”

— Frederick Buechner

Featured in: Make A Difference Quotes

7. “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

Featured in: Sunday Morning Quotes, Enjoy Life Quotes, Affirmation Quotes, Grace Quotes, Life is Beautiful Quotes

8. “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

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

— Frederick Buechner

10. “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

11. “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

Featured in: Smile Quotes

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

— Frederick Buechner

13. “When you remember me, it means 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.”

— Frederick Buechner

14. “Listen to your life. All moments are key moments.”

— Frederick Buechner

15. “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

16. “For as long as you remember me, I am never entirely lost.”

— Frederick Buechner

17. “The sacred moments, the moments of miracle, are often the everyday moments.”

— Frederick Buechner

18. “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

19. “Where your deep gladness meets with the deep hunger of the world, there you will find a further calling.”

— Frederick Buechner

20. “Go where your best prayers take you.”

— Frederick Buechner

21. “The world says, The more you take, the more you have. Christ says, the more you give, the more you are.”

— Frederick Buechner

22. “To be wise is to be eternally curious.”

— Frederick Buechner

23. “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

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

24. “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

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

— Frederick Buechner

26. “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

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

— Frederick Buechner

28. “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.”

— Frederick Buechner

29. “A Christian is one who points at Christ and says, ‘I can’t prove a thing, but there’s something about his eyes and his voice. 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

30. “If the truth is worth telling, it is worth making a fool of yourself to tell it.”

— Frederick Buechner

31. “Whenever you find tears in your eyes, especially unexpected tears, it is well to pay the closest attention.”

— Frederick Buechner

32. “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.”

— Frederick Buechner

33. “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

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

— Frederick Buechner

35. “Listen. Your life is happening. You are happening. Think back on your journey. The music of your life...”

— Frederick Buechner

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

— Frederick Buechner

37. “We find by losing. We hold fast by letting go. We become something new by ceasing to be something old.”

— Frederick Buechner

38. “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

39. “What’s lost is nothing to what’s found, and all the death that ever was, set next to life, would scarcely fill a cup.”

— Frederick Buechner

40. “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

41. “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

Featured in: Real Quotes

42. “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

43. “Coincidences are God’s way of getting our attention.”

— Frederick Buechner

44. “God doesn’t reveal his grand design. He reveals Himself.”

— Frederick Buechner

45. “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

46. “Five friends I had and two of them snakes.”

— Frederick Buechner

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

— Frederick Buechner

48. “Envy is the consuming desire to have everybody else as unsuccessful as you are.”

— Frederick Buechner

49. “We have God’s joy in our blood.”

— Frederick Buechner

50. “We learn to praise God not by paying compliments but by paying attention.”

— Frederick Buechner