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Grace is something you can never get but only be given.

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
Grace
Faith
Given
Something
Never

More quotes by Frederick Buechner

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...words are not only meaning but music and magic and power.
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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Your vocation lies in the intersection of the world's deep need and your deep joy.
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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Doubts are the ants in the pants of faith. They keep it awake and moving.
Frederick Buechner
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In honesty you have to admit to a wise man that prayer is not for the wise, not for the prudent, not for the sophisticated. Instead it is for those who recognize that in face of their deepest needs, all their wisdom is quite helpless. It is for those who are willing to persist in doing something that is both childish and crucial.
Frederick Buechner
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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
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The magic of words is that they have power to do more than convey meaning not only do they have the power to make things clear, they make things happen.
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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Whenever you find tears in your eyes, especially unexpected tears, it is well to pay the closest attention.
Frederick Buechner
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You hear as many things as you would imagine. I hear voices of people I loved once. I hear moments that took place. I hear silences.
Frederick Buechner
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The Jesus who is the one whom we search for even when we do not know that we are searching and hide from even when we do not know that we are hiding.
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
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To be commanded to love God at all, let alone in the wilderness, is like being commanded to be well when we are sick, to sing for joy when we are dying of thirst, to run when our legs are broken. But this is the first and great commandment nonetheless. Even in the wilderness - especially in the wilderness - you shall love him.
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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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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To be a saint is to be a little out of one's mind, which is a very good thing to be a little out of from time to time. It is to live a life that is always giving itself away and yet is always full.
Frederick Buechner
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If you want to be holy, be kind.
Frederick Buechner
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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.
Frederick Buechner
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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