Top 200 Frederick Buechner Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “It is more than just memory, I think, that binds us to the past. The past is the place we view the present from as much as the other way around...”

— Frederick Buechner

102. “Remember that the lives of other people are not your business. They are their business. They are God’s business because they all have God whether they use the word God or not. Even your own life is not your business. It also is God’s business. Leave it to God.”

— Frederick Buechner

103. “The decisive war is the other one – to become fully human, which means to become compassionate, honest, brave. And this is a war against the darkness which no man fights alone.”

— Frederick Buechner

104. “It hardly matters how the body of Jesus came to be missing because in the last analysis what convinced the people that he had risen from the dead was not the absence of his corpse but his living presence. And so it has been ever since.”

— Frederick Buechner

105. “We’ve all had saints in our lives, by which I mean not plaster saints, not moral exemplars, not people setting for us a kind of suffocating good example, but I mean saints in the sense of life givers. People through knowing whom we become more alive.”

— Frederick Buechner

106. “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. Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don’t be afraid. I am with you. Nothing can ever separate us. It’s for you I created the universe. I love you.”

— Frederick Buechner

107. “Words spoken in deep love or deep hate set things in motion in the human heart that can never be reversed.”

— Frederick Buechner

108. “When someone we love suffers, we suffer with that person, and we would not have it otherwise, because the suffering and the love are one, just as it is with God’s love for us.”

— Frederick Buechner

109. “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

110. “When friends speak overmuch of times gone by, often it’s because they sense their present time is turning them from friends to strangers. Long before the moment came to say goodbye, I think, we said goodbye in other words and ways and silences. Then when the moment came for it at last, we didn’t say it as should be said by friends. So now at last, dear Mouse, with many, many years between: goodbye.”

— Frederick Buechner

111. “In his holy flirtation with the world, God occasionally drops a handkerchief. These handkerchiefs are called saints.”

— Frederick Buechner

112. “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

113. “And it seems to me the world is a manger, the whole bloody mess of it, where God is being born again and again and again and again and again and again. You’ve got your mind on so many other things. You are so busy with this and that, you don’t see it. You don’t notice it.”

— Frederick Buechner

114. “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

115. “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

116. “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

117. “The contradiction is resolved when you realize that for Jesus peace seems to have meant not the absence of struggle, but the presence of love. -p83.”

— Frederick Buechner

118. “The trouble with really seeing and really hearing is that then we really have to do something about what we have seen and heard.”

— Frederick Buechner

119. “True faith, a simple life, a helping hand- the three things prized most in Heaven.”

— Frederick Buechner

120. “You do not need to understand healing to be healed or know anything about blessing to be blessed.”

— Frederick Buechner

121. “To be bored is to turn a cold shoulder to engage all that God is and has for you in the moment.”

— Frederick Buechner

122. “To remember the past is to see that we are here today by grace, that we have survived as a gift.”

— Frederick Buechner

123. “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

124. “Theology, like fiction, is largely autobiographical.”

— Frederick Buechner

125. “Grace is something you can never get but only be given.”

— Frederick Buechner

126. “To be bored to death is a form of suicide.”

— Frederick Buechner

127. “Toleration is often just indifference in disguise.”

— Frederick Buechner

128. “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

129. “To love your neighbor is to see your neighbor. To see somebody, really to see somebody, you have to love somebody.”

— Frederick Buechner

130. “Maybe the most sacred function of memory is just that: to render the distinction between past, present, and future ultimately meaningless; to enable us at some level of our being to inhabit that same eternity which it is said that God himself inhabits.”

— Frederick Buechner

131. “One of the blunders religious people are particularly fond of making is the attempt to be more spiritual than God.”

— Frederick Buechner

132. “Like a house in the rain, books were havens of permanence and protection from whatever it was that as a child I needed protection from.”

— Frederick Buechner

133. “I have spent uncounted hours of my life in such haggard waiting, crazy in my conviction that they would never come back at all because something unspeakable had happened to them the way I had learned as a child that unspeakable things happen. And it has taken me years to understand that what I feared most of all was perhaps less the disaster that might have befallen them than the disaster of being locked up in the dark of my own fear. The Cowardly Lion.”

— Frederick Buechner

134. “It is within the bonds of marriage that I, for one, found a greater freedom to be and to become and to share myself thatn I can imaine ever having found in any other kind of relationship.”

— Frederick Buechner

135. “At the evening of our day, we shall be judged by our loving.”

— Frederick Buechner

136. “The worst isn’t the last thing about the world. It’s the next to the last thing. The last thing is the best. It’s the power from on high that comes down into the world, that wells up from the rock-bottom worst of the world like a hidden spring. Can you believe it? The last, best thing is the laughing deep in the hearts of the saints, sometimes our hearts even. Yes. You are terribly loved and forgiven. Yes. You are healed. All is well.”

— Frederick Buechner

137. “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

138. “Not the least of my problems is that I can hardly even imagine what kind of an experience a genuine, self-authenticating religious experience would be. 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

139. “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

140. “We are all such escape artists, you and I. We don’t like to get too serious about things, especially about ourselves. When we are with other people, we are apt to talk about almost anything under the sun except for what really matters to us, except for our own lives, except for what is going on inside our own skins. We pass the time of day. We chatter. We hold each other at bay, keep our distance from each other even when God knows it is precisely each other that we desperately need.”

— Frederick Buechner

141. “You enter the extraordinary by way of the ordinary.”

— Frederick Buechner

142. “Nothing human’s not a broth of false and true.”

— Frederick Buechner

143. “At least for a moment we all saw, I think, that the danger of pluralism is that it becomes factionalism, and that if factions grind their separate axes too vociferously, something mutual, precious, and human is in danger of being drowned out and lost.”

— Frederick Buechner

144. “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

145. “Maybe nothing is more important than that we keep track, you and I, of these stories of who we are and where we have come from and the people we have met along the way because it is precisely through these stories in all their particularity, as I have long believed and often said, that God makes himself known to each of us most powerfully and personally. If this is true, it means that to lose track of our stories is to be profoundly impoverished not only humanly but also spiritually.”

— Frederick Buechner

146. “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

147. “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

148. “God in his unending greatness and glory and man in his unending littleness, prepared for the worst but rarely for the best, prepared for the possible but rarely for the impossible.”

— Frederick Buechner

149. “A God in the hand is worth two in the bush.”

— Frederick Buechner

150. “You can never be sure whether you are discovering the truth or inventing it.”

— Frederick Buechner