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Despair has been called the unforgivable sin-not presumably because God refuses to forgive it, but because it despairs of the possibility of being forgiven.

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
Despair
Unforgivable
Sin
Refuses
Possibility
Forgiven
Called
Forgive
Forgiving
Sadness
Refuse
Despairs
Misery
Presumably

More quotes by Frederick Buechner

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You can kiss your family and friends good-bye and put miles between you, but at the same time you carry them with you in your heart, your mind, your stomach, because you do not just live in a world but a world lives in you.
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To be wise is to be eternally curious.
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A God in the hand is worth two in the bush.
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Faith in God is less apt to proceed from miracles than miracles from faith in God.
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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.
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There is no event so common place but that God is present within it, always hidden, always leaving you room to recognize Him or not to recognize Him.
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Remember me not for the ill I've done but for the good I've dreamed.
Frederick Buechner
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Not to love is, psychically, spiritually, to die. To live for yourself alone, hoarding your life for your own sake, is in almost every sense that matters to reduce your life to a life hardly worth the living, and thus to lose it.
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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.
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I don't know that it makes any difference whether it's at this time or a hundred years before or a hundred years later. I think always it's a matter of simply listen[ing] to what is going on around you and in your own experience. Try to understand what's happening, or if not to understand it, at least to appreciate the reality of it.
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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.
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God himself does not give answers. He gives himself.
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The world says, The more you take, the more you have. Christ says, the more you give, the more you are.
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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You can never be sure whether you are discovering the truth or inventing it.
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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God in his unending greatness and glory and man in his unending littleness, prepared for the worst but rarely for the best, prepared for the possible but rarely for the impossible.
Frederick Buechner
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Toleration is often just indifference in disguise.
Frederick Buechner
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Even the saddest things can become, once we have made peace with them, a source of wisdom and strength.
Frederick Buechner
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The other day, the way people [do] who are approaching their 80th birthday, I was thinking about all the last business - funerals and where do you want to be buried - and I thought if anything were to be inscribed on my tombstone, I said let it be that.
Frederick Buechner