Quote

if you don't have doubts you're either kidding yourself or asleep. Doubts are the ants-in-the-pants of faith. They keep it alive and moving.

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
Keep
Doubts
Asleep
Pants
Either
Doubt
Alive
Faith
Kidding
Moving
Ants

More quotes by Frederick Buechner

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I believe with the best of who I am in God, but I sometimes think if anybody would watch me and [they] didn't believe a damn thing, they would have a very hard time deciding which of us is which.
Frederick Buechner
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Sin and grace, absence and presence, tragedy and comedy, they divide the world between them and where they meet head on, the Gospel happens.
Frederick Buechner
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Go where your best prayers take you.
Frederick Buechner
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One life on this earth is all that we get, whether it is enough or not enough, and the obvious conclusion would seem to be that at the very least we are fools if we do not live it as fully and bravely and beautifully as we can.
Frederick Buechner
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At the evening of our day, we shall be judged by our loving.
Frederick Buechner
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For some people, going to church is going home. In a very profound sense, I would say the same thing. Home is where Christ is.
Frederick Buechner
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the story of any one of us is in some measure the story of us all
Frederick Buechner
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To believe is not intellectual assent: Yes, I believe in Jesus. I will sign my name to the Nicene Creed. I believe it all - which you could do, [but] it would have no effect on who you were or what you did. It is, rather, to give your heart.
Frederick Buechner
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You enter the extraordinary by way of the ordinary
Frederick Buechner
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To be bored is to turn a cold shoulder to engage all that God is and has for you in the moment.
Frederick Buechner
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Snobs are people who look down on other people, but that does not justify our looking down on them. Who can say what dark fears of being inferior lurk behind their superior airs or what they suffer in private for the slights they dish out in public?
Frederick Buechner
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... the world can give you these glimpses as well as fairy tales can--the smell of rain, the dazzle of sun on white clapboard with the shadows of ferns and wash on the line, the wildness of a winter storm when in the house the flame of a candle doesn't even flicker.
Frederick Buechner
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She was right that reality can be harsh and that you shut your eyes to it only at your peril because if you do not face up to the enemy in all his dark power, then the enemy will come up from behind some dark day and destoy you while you are facing the other way.
Frederick Buechner
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Being a good steward of your pain. . . . It involves being alive to your life. It involves taking the risk of being open, of reaching out, of keeping in touch with the pain as well as the joy of what happens because at no time more than at a painful time do we live out of the depths of who we are instead of out of the shallows.
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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The world needs people who save lives.
Frederick Buechner
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To remember the past is to see that we are here today by grace, that we have survived as a gift.
Frederick Buechner
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Faith is not being sure where you're going, but going anyway.
Frederick Buechner
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If what makes you happy is going out and living it up and spending all your money on wine, women, and song, the world doesn't need that. But on the other hand, if you give your life to good works - you go and work in a leper colony and it doesn't make you happy - the chances are you're not doing it very well.
Frederick Buechner
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Listen to your life. Listen to what happens to you because it is through what happens to you that God speaks...It's in language that's not always easy to decipher, but it's there powerfully, memorably, unforgettably.
Frederick Buechner