Frederick Buechner: Use

Frederick Buechner is Poet, novelist, short story writer, theologian. Explore interesting quotes on use.
Frederick Buechner: 134 quotes13 likes

“If we are to believe he is really alive with all that that implies, then we have to believe without proof. And of course that is the only way it could be. If it could be somehow proved, then we would have no choice but to believe. We would lose our freedom not to believe. And in the very moment that we lost that freedom, we would cease to be human beings. Our love of God would have been forced upon us, and love that is forced is of course not love at all. Love must be freely given. Love must live in the freedom not to love; it must take risks. Love must be prepared to suffer even as Jesus on the Cross suffered, and part of that suffering is doubt.”

Frederick Buechner

The Magnificent Defeat (1966)

“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

Source: Telling Secrets (1991)

“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

Source: The Magnificent Defeat

“Faith is stepping out into the unknown with nothing to guide us but a hand just beyond our grasp.”

Frederick Buechner

Source: The Magnificent Defeat (1966)

“Lord, I believe; help my unbelief' is the best any of us can do really, but thank God it is enough.”

Frederick Buechner

Source: The Magnificent Defeat (1966)

“From the simplest lyric to the most complex novel and densest drama, 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 in 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

Whistling in the Dark: A Doubter's Dictionary (1988)

“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

Secrets in the Dark: A Life in Sermons (2006)

“Stop trying to protect, to rescue, to judge, to manage the lives around you... remember that the lives of others are not your business. They are their business. They are God’s business... even your own life is not your business. It also is God’s business. Leave it to God. It is an astonishing thought. It can become a life-transforming thought... unclench the fists of your spirit and take it easy... What deadens us most to God’s presence within us, I think, is the inner dialogue that we are continuously engaged in with ourselves, the endless chatter of human thought. I suspect that there is nothing more crucial to true spiritual comfort... than being able from time to time to stop that chatter...”

Frederick Buechner

Telling Secrets (1991)

“[W]e are none of us very good at silence. It says too much.”

Frederick Buechner

Telling the Truth (1977)

“There is a fragrance in the air, a certain passage of a song, an old photograph falling out from the pages of a book, the sound of somebody's voice in the hall that makes your heart leap and fills your eyes with tears. Who can say when or how it will be that something easters up out of the dimness to remind us of a time before we were born and after we will die?”

Frederick Buechner

Telling the Truth (1977)

“Our house is on the eastern slope of Rupert Mountain, just off a country road, still unpaved then, and five miles from the nearest town…Even at the most unpromising times of year – in mudtime, on bleak, snowless winter days – it is in so many unexpected ways beautiful that even after all this time I have never quite gotten used to it. I have seen other places equally beautiful in my time, but never, anywhere, have I seen one more so.”

Frederick Buechner

Now and Then: A Memoir of Vocation (1983)

“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

Telling Secrets (1991)

“With words as valueless as poker chips, we play games whose object it is to keep us from seeing each other’s cards.”

Frederick Buechner

The Alphabet of Grace (1970)

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

Frederick Buechner

Now and Then: A Memoir of Vocation (1983)