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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.
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
Living
Matters
Sense
Sake
Live
Worth
Psychically
Matter
Lose
Hoarding
Every
Loses
Spiritually
Love
Alone
Reduce
Life
Almost
Hardly
Dies
Thus
More quotes by Frederick Buechner
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
You can't be too careful what you tell a child because you never know what he'll take hold of and spend the rest of his life remembering you by.
Frederick Buechner
To remember the past is to see that we are here today by grace, that we have survived as a gift.
Frederick Buechner
Thus, when you wake up in the morning, called by God to be a self again, if you want to know who you are, watch your feet. Because where your feet take you, that is who you are.
Frederick Buechner
Listen. Your life is happening. You are happening. Think back on your journey. The music of your life.
Frederick Buechner
Beneath the worst the world can do, there is always the glimmer of the best.
Frederick Buechner
The world says, The more you take, the more you have. Christ says, the more you give, the more you are.
Frederick Buechner
Beneath our clothes, our reputations, our pretensions, beneath our religion or lack of it, we are all vulnerable both to the storm without and the storm within.
Frederick Buechner
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
The kind of work God usually calls you to is the kind of work (a) that you need most to do and (b) that the world most needs to have done....the place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet
Frederick Buechner
I say, “You may be right, but don’t knock it until you’re tried it. Don’t say, ‘I think it’s worthless therefore I’m not going to spend any time looking into myself the way one who prays does.'” Maybe that’s an even worse mistake than praying might be.
Frederick Buechner
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.
Frederick Buechner
When [our secrets] are sad and hurtful secrets, like my father's death, we can in a way honor the hurt by letting ourselves feel it as we never let ourselves feel it before, and then, having felt it, by laying it aside we can start to take care of ourselves the way we take care of people we love.
Frederick Buechner
If you want to talk about grace, if you want to talk about revelation, talk about your life with some depth, which doesn't mean lurid revelations as much as simply looking at your own deep experiences and describing them as they are.
Frederick Buechner
I think most people, if I asked, would say, Yes, of course I believe. But I think for a great many of them it doesn't really make much difference in terms of either what they do with their lives or with their own inner well-being. They believe because so did grandfather, and that's the same church they've been going to all these years.
Frederick Buechner
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
Justice is the grammar of things. Mercy is the poetry of things.
Frederick Buechner
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
Speak in your own voice and speak about things that you have in some sense witnessed, not just things you read about or have been taught about in seminary. To talk about the resurrection, think about those moments where in some way you have been resurrected.
Frederick Buechner
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.
Frederick Buechner
