Inspirational Quotes by Frederick Buechner

“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.”

“Martin Luther said once, 'If I were God, I'd kick the world to pieces.' But Martin Luther wasn't God. God is God, and God has never kicked the world to pieces. He keeps re-entering the world. He keeps offering himself to the world by grace, keeps somehow blessing the world, making possible a kind of life which we all, in our deepest being, hunger for.”

“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.”

“Grace is something you can never get but can only be given. There's no way to earn it or deserve it or bring it about anymore than you can deserve the taste of raspberries and cream or earn good looks.”

“If you want to be holy, be kind.”

“In the long run, there can be no joy for anybody until there is joy finally for us all.”

“Laugh till you weep. Weep till there's nothing left but to laugh at your weeping. In the end it's all one.”

“[T]he Gospel writers are not really interested primarily in the facts of the birth but in the significance, the meaning for them of that birth just as the people who love us are not really interested primarily in the facts of our births but in what it meant to them when we were born and how for them the world was never the same again, how their whole lives were charged with new significance.”

“If you were aware of how precious today is, you could hardly live through it. Unless you are aware of how precious it is, you can hardly be said to be living at all.”

“Pay mind to your own life, your own health, and wholeness. A bleeding heart is of no help to anyone if it bleeds to death.”

“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.”

“Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery 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.”

“To journey for the sake of saving our own lives is little by little to cease to live in any sense that really matters, even to ourselves, because it is only by journeying for the world's sake - even when the world bores and sickens and scares you half to death - that little by little we start to come alive.”

“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.”

“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.”

“God does not sow the field of our life. He does not make these things happen. He did not cause Chester’s car to smash into Paula’s car, killing her young husband and her daughter. God doesn’t deal with the world that way; he doesn’t move us around like chess pieces. He does not sow, but he expects that out of whatever the world in its madness does to us, we will somehow reap a harvest. He does not sow these things that happen, but he expects us to deal with these things in creative and redemptive and life-opening sorts of ways. But again, the one-talent man was right, God does reap where he did not sow. He gathers where he did not winnow. He does not sow the pain, he does not make the pain happen, but he looks to us to harvest treasure from the pain.”

“You’ve been a good steward of it. You’ve been a good steward of your pain.”

“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.”

“Writing does a lot of other things, of course. People write books to instruct. They write books to move us, to scare us, to enlighten us in all sorts of ways. But basically what these works of literature or of art are doing is to say, Stop thinking. Stop expecting. Stop living in the past. Stop living in the future. Stop doing anything and just pay attention to this.”

“It’s so easy to look and see what we pass through in this world, but we don’t. If you’re like me, you see so little. You see what you expect to see rather than what’s there.”