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Envy is the consuming desire to have everybody else as unsuccessful as you are.

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
Unsuccessful
Consuming
Envy
Everybody
Desire
Else

More quotes by Frederick Buechner

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To believe in Christ is to give your heart to Christ, which means not to affirm things about Christ, but it's like what you mean when you say, I believe in my friend.
Frederick Buechner
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Lord, catch me off guard today. Surprise me with some moment of beauty or pain so that at least for the moment, I may be startled into seeing that you are here in all your splendor, always and everywhere, barely hidden, beneath, beyond, within this life I breathe.
Frederick Buechner
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It is important to tell our secrets too because ... it makes it easier for other people to tell us a secret or two of their own, and exchanges like that have a lot to do with what being a family is all about and what being human is all about.
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
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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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Almost nothing that makes any real difference can be proved.
Frederick Buechner
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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
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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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It is as impossible for man to demonstrate the existence of God as it would be for even Sherlock Holmes to demonstrate the existence of Arthur Conan Doyle.
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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Pay mind to your own life, your own health, and wholeness. A bleeding heart is of no help to anyone if it bleeds to death.
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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A Christian isn't necessarily any nicer than anybody else, just better informed.
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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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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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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We must be careful with our lives, for Christ's sake, because it would seem that they are the only lives we are going to have in this puzzling and perilous world, and so they are very precious and what we do with them matters enormously.
Frederick Buechner
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I don't want to give the impression that I'm a great Bible reader. I don't sit down every day and read for an hour through the Bible. But I really do read it with a great deal of pleasure... which is the last thing I would have suspected. So I read it sometimes as a devotional, but really more, not for fun, but because it's fascinating.
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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Five friends I had and two of them snakes.
Frederick Buechner