Top 200 Frederick Buechner Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “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

52. “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

53. “I suspect that Jesus spoke many of his parables as a kind of sad and holy joke and that that may be part of why he seemed reluctant to explain them because if you have to explain a joke, you might as well save your breath.”

— Frederick Buechner

54. “Maybe at the heart of all our traveling is the dream of someday, somehow, getting Home.”

— Frederick Buechner

55. “It’s less the words they say than those they leave unsaid that split old friends apart.”

— Frederick Buechner

56. “Sometimes the things that do not quite happen in your life count for more than the things that do.”

— Frederick Buechner

57. “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

58. “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

59. “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

60. “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

61. “What keeps the wild hope of Christmas alive year after year in a world notorious for dashing all hopes is the haunting dream that the child who was born that day may yet be born again even in us.”

— Frederick Buechner

62. “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

63. “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

64. “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

65. “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

66. “In winter when the snow and ice were fierce, we shook beneath our different roofs alone, and that’s what Hell is like, I think. It’s cold and shame and shaking. And worst of all, it’s loneliness.”

— Frederick Buechner

67. “Faith is the assurance that the best and holiest dream is true after all.”

— Frederick Buechner

68. “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

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

— Frederick Buechner

70. “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

71. “Almost nothing that makes any real difference can be proved.”

— Frederick Buechner

72. “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

73. “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

74. “You have to suffer in order to be beautiful.”

— Frederick Buechner

75. “Remember me not for the ill I’ve done but for the good I’ve dreamed.”

— Frederick Buechner

76. “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

77. “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

78. “Faith is not being sure where you’re going, but going anyway.”

— Frederick Buechner

79. “Of the Seven Deadly Sins, anger is possibly the most fun. To lick your wounds, to smack your lips over grievances long past, to roll over your tongue the prospect of bitter confrontations still to come, to savor to the last toothsome morsel both the pain you are given and the pain you are giving back – in many ways it is a feast fit for a king. The chief drawback is that what you are wolfing down is yourself. The skeleton at the feast is you.”

— Frederick Buechner

80. “Faith in God is less apt to proceed from miracles than miracles from faith in God.”

— Frederick Buechner

81. “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

82. “If it seems a childish thing to do, do it in remembrance that you are a child.”

— Frederick Buechner

83. “If preachers decide to preach about hope, let them preach out of what they themselves hope for.”

— Frederick Buechner

84. “Don’t look down on them for looking down on us. Look at them, instead, as friends we don’t know yet and who don’t yet know what they are missing in not knowing us.”

— Frederick Buechner

85. “If our pain doesn’t destroy us, it just might transform us into truly human beings at last.”

— Frederick Buechner

86. “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

87. “Much as we wish, not one of us can bring back yesterday or shape tomorrow. Only today is ours, and it will not be ours for long, and once it is gone it will never in all time be ours again. Thou only knowest what it holds in store for us, yet even we know something of what it will hold. The chance to speak the truth, to show mercy, to ease another’s burden. The chance to resist evil, to remember all the good times and good people of our past, to be brave, to be strong, to be glad.”

— Frederick Buechner

88. “Unbelief is as much of a choice as belief is. What makes it in many ways more appealing is that whereas to believe in something requires some measure of understanding and effort, not to believe doesn’t require much of anything at all.”

— Frederick Buechner

89. “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

90. “She was right that reality can be harsh and that you shut your eyes to it only at your peril because if you do not face up to the enemy in all his dark power, then the enemy will come up from behind some dark day and destoy you while you are facing the other way.”

— Frederick Buechner

91. “There is treasure buried in the field of every one of our days, even the bleakest or dullest, and it is our business, as we journey, to keep our eyes peeled for it.”

— Frederick Buechner

92. “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

93. “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

94. “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

95. “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

96. “So, art is saying Stop. It helps us to stop by putting a frame around something and makes us see it in a way we would never have seen it under the normal circumstances of living, as so many of us do, on sort of automatic pilot, going through the world without really seeing much of anything.”

— Frederick Buechner

97. “Jesus didn’t come to merely speak words that were true, He is the Word that makes us true.”

— Frederick Buechner

98. “All other days have either disappeared into darkness and oblivion or not yet emerged from it. Today is the only day there is.”

— Frederick Buechner

99. “Wether you call on him or don’t call on him, God will be present with you.”

— Frederick Buechner

100. “The world is in pain, and its pain makes strangers of us all and ties my tongue in a lover’s knot.”

— Frederick Buechner