Top 200 Frederick Buechner Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “You can never be sure whether you are discovering the truth or inventing it.”

— Frederick Buechner

152. “The world speaks of holy things in the only language it knows, which is worldly language.”

— Frederick Buechner

153. “Think of these pages as graffiti maybe, and where I have scratched up in a public place my longings and loves, my grievances and indecencies, be reminded in private of your own. In that way, at least, we can hold a kind of converse.”

— Frederick Buechner

154. “When Godric banished Fairweather and Tune, they all three bled for it, and part of Godric snaked off too, nevermore to come again. And it’s Godric’s flesh that Ailred’s cough cleaves to like an axe. And when brave Mouse went down off Wales, he bore to the bottom the cut of Godric’s sharp farewell. And when Gillian vanished in a Dover wood, she took with her all but the husk of Godric’s joy.”

— Frederick Buechner

155. “Sitting there in the Alabama winter with my mouth full of cold turnip and mud, I could see at least for a moment how if you ever took truly to heart the ultimate goodness and joy of things, even at their bleakest, the need to praise someone or something for it would be so great that you might even have to go out and speak of it to the birds of the air.”

— Frederick Buechner

156. “The fatted calf, the best Scotch, the hoedown could all have been his too, any time he asked for them except that he never thought to ask for them because he was too busy trying cheerlessly and religiously to earn them.”

— Frederick Buechner

157. “The real turning point in human history is less apt to be the day the wheel is invented or Rome falls than the day a boy is born to a couple of hick Jews.”

— Frederick Buechner

158. “It was not so much that a door opened as that I suddenly found that a door had been open all along which I had only just then stumbled upon.”

— Frederick Buechner

159. “The sadness was I’d lost a father I had never fully found. It’s like a tune that ends before you’ve heard it out. Your whole life through you search to catch the strain, and seek the face you’ve lost in strangers’ faces.”

— Frederick Buechner

160. “The Jesus who is the one whom we search for even when we do not know that we are searching and hide from even when we do not know that we are hiding.”

— Frederick Buechner

161. “Lying to God is like sawing the branch you’re sitting on. The better you do it, the harder you fall.”

— Frederick Buechner

162. “Christ never promises peace in the sense of no more struggle and suffering. Instead, he helps us to struggle and suffer as he did, in love for one another.”

— Frederick Buechner

163. “It will be no ordinary birth but a virgin birth because the birth of righteousness and love in this stern world is always a virgin birth. It is never men nor the nations of men nor all the power and wisdom of men that bring it forth but always God, and that is why the angel says, ‘The child to be born will be called the Son of God.”

— Frederick Buechner

164. “I try not to stack the deck unduly but always let doubt and darkness have their say along with faith and hope, not just because it is good apologetics – woe to him who tries to make it look simple and easy – but because to do it any other way would be to be less true to the elements of doubt and darkness that exist in myself no less than in others.”

— Frederick Buechner

165. “Be merciful to yourself, stop fighting yourself quite so much. Maybe what you are asking of yourself, what you’re driving yourself to do or to be, what you put a gun to your own back to make yourself do, is something at this point you needn’t have to think about doing. So, think back at the end of the day to the wars you’re involved in. How are they going?”

— Frederick Buechner

166. “THEOLOGY IS THE study of God and his ways. For all we know, dung beetles may study man and his ways and call it humanology. If so, we would probably be more touched and amused than irritated. One hopes that God feels likewise.”

— Frederick Buechner

167. “As I understand it, to say that God is mightily present even in such private events as these does not mean that he makes events happen to us which move us in certain directions like chessmen. Instead, events happen under their own steam as random as rain, which means that God is present in them not as their cause but as the one who even in the hardest and most hair-raising of them offers us the possibility of that new life and healing which I believe is what salvation is.”

— Frederick Buechner

168. “He also said we should carve in the year and place where I was born, but I said no. As a man dies many times before he’s dead, so does he wend from birth to birth until, by grace, he comes alive at last.”

— Frederick Buechner

169. “This is what I think, in essence, prayer is. It is the breaking of silence. It is the need to be known and the need to know. Prayer is the sound made by our deepest aloneness.”

— Frederick Buechner

170. “Your father lies beneath a stone,′ old Aedwen mumbles, dozing at her wheel, and Godric thinks how it’s a stone as well they’re all beneath. The stone is need and hurt and gall and tongue-tied longing, for that’s the stone that kinship always bears, yet the loss of it would press more grievous still.”

— Frederick Buechner

171. “I find I need to put things into words before I can believe that they are entirely real.”

— Frederick Buechner

172. “If I were called upon to state in a few words the essence of everything I was trying to say both as a novelist and as a preacher it would be something like this: Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery that 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

173. “We are commanded to love our neighbors as ourselves, and I believe that to love ourselves means to extend to those various selves that we have been along the way the same degree of compassion and concern that we would extend to anyone else.”

— Frederick Buechner

174. “A Christian isn’t necessarily any nicer than anybody else, just better informed.”

— Frederick Buechner

175. “The writers who get my personal award are the ones who show exceptional promise of looking at their lives in this world as candidly and searchingly and feelingly as they know how and then of telling the rest of us what they have found there most worth finding. We need the eyes of writers like that to see through. We need the blood of writers like that in our veins.”

— Frederick Buechner

176. “This side of Nirvana, there is no such escape for any of us as far as I know.”

— Frederick Buechner

177. “A GLUTTON IS ONE who raids the icebox for a cure for spiritual malnutrition.”

— Frederick Buechner

178. “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

179. “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

180. “I would go so far as to say that it may even have caused him to think the more highly of them because their unbelief grew from a far more honest view of the wretchedness of things than the belief of the devout who see only what they choose to see and turn a blind eye on the rest.”

— Frederick Buechner

181. “More than the painting you see or the music you hear, the words you read become in the very act of reading them part of who you are, especially if they are the words of exceptionally promising writers. If there is poison in the words, you are poisoned; if there is nourishment, you are nourished; if there is beauty, you are made a little more beautiful. In Hebrew, the word dabar means both word and also deed. A word doesn’t merely say something, it does something. It brings something into being.”

— Frederick Buechner

182. “If it please you, the lady’s name again?” says Reginald. His quill is poised. If God had come to Reginald and not to Moses in the burning bush, he would have asked him how to spell the great I AM so he’d be sure he had it right.”

— Frederick Buechner

183. “How Adewen stuffed her braid in her mouth at that! Or she’d cover her mirth with her hands and shake till you’d think that the fit was upon her. She did the same too when she wept so you’d never be sure which she hid with her hands, her tears or her cackling. I think there were times she herself didn’t know, nor does anyone know at times. 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

184. “O thou who art the sparrow’s friend,” he said, “have mercy on this world that knows not even when it sins. O holy dove, descend and roost on Godric here so that a heart may hatch in him at last. Amen.”

— Frederick Buechner

185. “I think that I learned something about how even tragedy can be a means of grace that I might never have come to any other way.”

— Frederick Buechner

186. “We try to fend off this world we yearn for where men live together as brothers because there is something in each of us that wants to live not for his brother but for himself. We fend it off because we know in our terrible wisdom that the price we must pay for it is death, the death of self and all the values of self, the death that must take place before the life can come.”

— Frederick Buechner

187. “The other danger is that apologists put so much effort into what they do that they may end up not so much defending the faith because they believe it is true as believing the faith is true because they have worked so hard and long to defend it.”

— Frederick Buechner

188. “From the simplest lyric to the most complex novel, literature is asking us to pay attention. Pay attention to the frog. Pay attention to the west wind. Pay attention to the boy on the raft, the lady on the tower, the old man on the train. In sum, pay attention to the world and all that dwells therein and thereby learn at last to pay attention to yourself and all that dwells therein.”

— Frederick Buechner

189. “To sentimentalise something is to look only at the emotion in it and at the emotion it stirs in us rather than at the reality of it, which we are always tempted not to look at because reality, truth, silence are all what we are not much good at and avoid when we can. To sentimentalise something is to savour rather than to suffer the sadness of it, is to sigh over the prettiness of it rather than to tremble at the beauty of it, which may make fearsome demands of us or pose fearsome threats.”

— Frederick Buechner

190. “I hold my plush monkey over the bannister and let it drop. Its eyes light up when you squeeze its kidneys as whose eyes, I suppose, would not.”

— Frederick Buechner

191. “The faces we lose track of most easily are the faces of the people who are closest to us, the people we love the most whose faces we see so often that we can’t really see them anymore.”

— Frederick Buechner

192. “It seems to me almost before the Bible says anything else, it is saying that – how important it is to be alive and to pay attention to being alive, pay attention to each other, pay attention to God as he moves and as he speaks. Pay attention to where life or God has tried to take you.”

— Frederick Buechner

193. “You use your real voice with those you love, and you cannot be phony with those who know you well.”

— Frederick Buechner

194. “I’ll tell you this. I’ve labored all my life. I’ve baked and brewed. I’ve woven, spun, and dyed. I’ve kept my husband’s house and raised his young. And many other things besides. So where was time for holiness? What strength was left for faith? Let monks and nuns and priests have care of that. The dead shall rise? The Lord himself will sit as justicer in manor court? It may be true for all I know. But in the meanwhile bread, beer, work, and rest at night, they’re truth enough for me.”

— Frederick Buechner

195. “It is not objective proof of God’s existence that we want but, whether we use religious language for it or not, the experience of God’s presence.”

— Frederick Buechner

196. “So generally – and this is not a complicated point, God knows – the arts frame our life for us so that we will experience it. Pay attention to it.”

— Frederick Buechner

197. “People are prepared for everything except for the fact that beyond the darkness of their blindness there is a great light. They are prepared to go on breaking their backs plowing the same old field until the cows come home without seeing, until they stub their toes on it, that there is a treasure buried in that field rich enough to buy Texas.”

— Frederick Buechner

198. “Knowing that even though you see only through a glass darkly, even though lots of things happen – wars and peacemaking, hunger and homelessness – joy is knowing, even for a moment, that underneath everything are the everlasting arms.”

— Frederick Buechner

199. “I never took it for granted that they believed any of even the most basic affirmations of the Christian faith concerning such matters as God and Jesus, sin and salvation, but always tried to speak to their skepticism and to honor their doubts. I made a point of never urging on them anything I did not believe myself. I was candid about what, like them, I was puzzled by and uncertain of. I tried to be myself. I tried to be honest.”

— Frederick Buechner

200. “But when melody wells up in thrushes’ throats, and bees buzz honeysong, and rock and river clap like hands in summer sun, then misery’s drowned in minstrelsy, and Godric’s glad in spite of all. Yet sometimes too he’s sad in spite of all, God knows, for there are other voices than the poor’s.”

— Frederick Buechner