Quote

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.

Frederick Buechner

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Frederick Buechner
Age: 98
Born: 1926
Born: July 11
Autobiographer
Novelist
Poet
Theologian
Writer
New York City
New York
Carl Frederick Buechner
Matter
Half
Scare
Even
Lives
Saving
Really
Sense
Cease
World
Death
Matters
Littles
Sake
Sickens
Live
Journey
Journeying
Little
Alive
Scares
Come
Start
Bores

More quotes by Frederick Buechner

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Grace is something you can never get but only be given.
Frederick Buechner
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The trouble with really seeing and really hearing is that then we really have to do something about what we have seen and heard.
Frederick Buechner
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Faith in God is less apt to proceed from miracles than miracles from faith in God.
Frederick Buechner
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If you want to be holy, be kind.
Frederick Buechner
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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
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Religion points to that area of human experience where in one way or another man comes upon mystery as a summons to pilgrimage.
Frederick Buechner
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We must be careful with our lives, for Christ's sake, because it would seem that they are the only lives we are going to have in this puzzling and perilous world, and so they are very precious and what we do with them matters enormously.
Frederick Buechner
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Listen. Your life is happening. You are happening. Think back on your journey. The music of your life.
Frederick Buechner
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God himself does not give answers. He gives himself.
Frederick Buechner
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It is important to tell our secrets too because ... it makes it easier for other people to tell us a secret or two of their own, and exchanges like that have a lot to do with what being a family is all about and what being human is all about.
Frederick Buechner
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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.
Frederick Buechner
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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.
Frederick Buechner
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Lord, catch me off guard today. Surprise me with some moment of beauty or pain so that at least for the moment, I may be startled into seeing that you are here in all your splendor, always and everywhere, barely hidden, beneath, beyond, within this life I breathe.
Frederick Buechner
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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. A good night's sleep is grace and so are good dreams. Most tears are grace. The smell of rain is grace. Somebody loving you is grace.
Frederick Buechner
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Words spoken in deep love or deep hate set things in motion in the human heart that can never be reversed.
Frederick Buechner
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Doubts are the ants in the pants of faith. They keep it awake and moving.
Frederick Buechner
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Theology, like fiction, is largely autobiographical.
Frederick Buechner
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Like a house in the rain, books were havens of permanence and protection from whatever it was that as a child I needed protection from.
Frederick Buechner
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The life I touch for good or ill will touch another life, and in turn another, until who knows where the trembling stops or in what far place my touch will be felt.
Frederick Buechner
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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.
Frederick Buechner