Top 200 Frederick Buechner Quotes (2024 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: Healing Quotes

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

— Frederick Buechner

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

— Frederick Buechner

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

— Frederick Buechner

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

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

— Frederick Buechner

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

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

— Frederick Buechner

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

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

— Frederick Buechner

17. “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

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. “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

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

— Frederick Buechner

24. “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

25. “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

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

— Frederick Buechner

27. “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

28. “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

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

— Frederick Buechner

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

— Frederick Buechner

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

— Frederick Buechner

32. “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

33. “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

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

— Frederick Buechner

35. “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

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

— Frederick Buechner

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

— Frederick Buechner

38. “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

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

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

— Frederick Buechner

43. “We have God’s joy in our blood.”

— Frederick Buechner

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

— Frederick Buechner

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

— Frederick Buechner

46. “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

47. “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

48. “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

49. “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

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

— Frederick Buechner