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.”

“The life I touch for good or ill will touch another life, and that in turn another, until who knows where the trembling stops or in what far place my touch will be felt.”

“To find our calling is to find the intersection between our own deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger.”

“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.”

“I did not see anything because I was so caught up in an inner dialogue. So, stop and see. Become more sensitive, more aware, more alive to our own humanness, to the humanness of each other.”

“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.”

“We’re all, by and large, comparatively speaking, rich people and have perhaps more than one home. And yet the question is, are we really at home anywhere? Are we really at home in any of our homes? Because it seems to me that to be at home somewhere means to be at peace somewhere and I have a feeling at some deep level there can really be no peace for any of us, no real home for any of us, until there is some measure of real peace for everybody until everybody has a home.”