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You can never be sure whether you are discovering the truth or inventing 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
Truth
Never
Inventing
Discovering
Sure
Whether

More quotes by Frederick Buechner

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If we are to love our neighbors, before doing anything else we must see our neighbors. With our imagination as well as our eyes, that is to say like artists, we must see not just their faces but the life behind and within their faces. Here it is love that is the frame we see them in.
Frederick Buechner
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Grace is something you can never get but only be given.
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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Vocation is the place where the world's greatest need and a person's greatest joy meet.
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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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
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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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Prayers out of, very often, not the most religious part of me, but the most anxious part of me, the most desperately loving, fearing part of me.
Frederick Buechner
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What makes you, in the deepest sense of the word, happy? That's what you should be doing, if the other part is also met - if it is something the world needs.
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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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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Becoming a Christian was terribly helpful to me. I can't imagine finding my way without it. I think it can be very crucially important to ally yourself with some religion.
Frederick Buechner
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He [Jesus] speaks in parables, and though we have approached these parables reverentially all these many years and have heard them expounded as grave and reverent vehicles of holy truth, I suspect that many if not all of them were originally not grave at all but were antic, comic, often more than just a little shocking.
Frederick Buechner
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Go where your best prayers take you.
Frederick Buechner
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Almost nothing that makes any real difference can be proved.
Frederick Buechner
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People are disturbed not by things but by the view they take of them. They may forget what you said, but they will never forget how you made them feel.
Frederick Buechner
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Turn around and believe that the good news that we are loved is better than we ever dared hope, and that to believe in that good news, to live out of it and toward it, to be in love with that good news, is of all glad things in this world the gladdest thing of all. Amen, and come Lord Jesus.
Frederick Buechner
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We cannot make the Kingdom of God happen, but we can put out leaves as it draws near. We can be kind to each other. We can be kind to ourselves. We can drive back the darkness a little. We can make green places within ourselves and among ourselves where God can make his Kingdom happen.
Frederick Buechner
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Theology, like fiction, is largely autobiographical.
Frederick Buechner
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You can survive on your own you can grow strong on your own you can prevail on your own but you cannot become human on your own.
Frederick Buechner