Inspirational Quotes by Frederick Buechner

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

“The only patriots worth their salt are the ones who love their country enough to see that in a nuclear age it is not going to survive unless the world survives. True patriots are no longer champions of Democracy, Communism, or anything like that but champions of the Human Race.”

“Go where your best prayers take you.”

“Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom," the good thief said from his cross (Luke 23:42). There are perhaps no more human words in all of Scripture, no prayer we can pray so well.”

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

“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.”

“If you forget me, one of the ways I remember who I am will be gone. If you forget me, part of who I am will be gone.”

“By and large a good rule for finding out is this: the kind of work God usually calls you to is the kind of work a) that you need most to do and b) the world most needs to have done. If you really get a kick out of your work, you've presumably met requirement a), but if your work is writing TV deodorant commercials, the chances are you've missed requirement b).”

“All theology, like all fiction, is at its heart autobiography.”

“Toleration is often just indifference in disguise.”

“Our eyes are just our eyes and not all we have for seeing, maybe not even the best we have for seeing. Facts are all the eye can see, eyes cannot see truth. It's not with the eyes of the head that we see truths like that, but with the eyes of the heart. To see (Jesus) with the heart is to know, in the long run, that his life is the only life worth living.”

“God intends his wise, creative, loving presence and power to be reflected into his world through his human creatures. He has enlisted us to act as his stewards in the project of creation. And, following the disaster of rebellion and corruption, he has built into the gospel message the fact that through the work of Jesus and the power of the Spirit, he equips humans to help in the work of getting the project back on track.”

“Have you really seen God?" he said, placing his hand on the young man's shoulder and fixing him with his protuberant eyes. Believing that the sound he could hear of a thousand voices singing was no longer the wind, Averill said, "I am seeing him now.”

“And over there, London is also on fire, and they say that Hyde Park is carpeted with crocuses purple as flame, and botanists haunt bomb craters for flowers, unknown since the great fire of 1666, brought to life by nitrates from the burning bombs, life blossoming out of death, beauty out of pain, the past out of the present, these fundamental things of life as time goes by. (78-79)”

“To say that I was born again, to use that traditional phrase, is to say too much because I remained in most ways as self-centered and squeamish after the fact as I was before, and God knows remain so still. And in another way to say that I was born again is to say too little because there have been more than a few such moments since, times when from beyond time something too precious to tell has glinted in the dusk, always just out of reach, like fireflies.”

“To forgive somebody is to say one way or another, "You have done something unspeakable, and by all rights I should call it quits between us. Both my pride and my principles demand no less. However, although I make no guarantees that I will be able to forget what you've done, and though we may both carry the scars for life, I refuse to let it stand between us. I still want you for my friend." To accept forgiveness means to admit that you've done something unspeakable that needs to be forgiven, and thus both parties must swallow the same thing: their pride.”

“We cannot make ourselves known to each other; we are not healed and forgiven by each other’s presence. With words as valueless as poker chips, we play games whose object it is to keep us from seeing each other’s cards. Chit-chat games in which “How are you?” means “Don’t tell me who you are,” and “I’m alone and scared” becomes “Fine thanks.” Games where the players create the illusion of being in the same room but where the reality of it is that each is alone inside a skin in that room, like bathyspheres at the bottom of the sea. Blind man’s buff games where everyone is blind.”

“Or I think of breathing - the body in its wisdom taking its sustenance out of the air even when the conscious mind, the will, the hunger both for life and for death, are asleep. I think of the breathing of one who is asleep, how suddenly in some dark passage of the night the breathing becomes a word, the dreamer speaks, and through his word the fragment of a dream passes from inner world to outer world. The visible effects of the invisible manifest themselves.”

“The New Testament itself is written that way: the risen Christ coming back at dawn to the Sea of Tiberias, Jesus with the mystery of life and death upon him, standing there on the beach saying, “Have you any fish?” (John 21:5). Have you any fish, for Christ’s sweet sake! Precisely that. The Christ and the chowder. The Messiah and the mackerel. The Word and the flesh. The first voice and the second voice. It is what the great text is all about, of course, this mystery, this tension and scandal; and the text itself, with this antiphony of voices, is its own illustration. Somebody has to do the vacuuming. Somebody has to keep the accounts and put out the cat. And we are grateful for these things to the second voice, which is also of course our own voice, puny and inexhaustible as Faulkner said. It is a human voice. It is the only voice the universe has for speaking of itself and to itself. It is a voice with its own message, its own mystery, and it is important to be told that it was not the Baptist, it was Jesus—not that one standing over there bony and strident in the Jordan, but this one with the queer north-country accent, full of grace and truth. Behold, the Baptist said, that is the lamb of God. Not this one, but that one. We need to know.”

“Payattention.  As a summation of all that I have had to say as a writer, I would settle for that.  And as a talisman or motto for that journey in search of a homeland, which is what faith is, I would settle for that too.”