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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
Desire
Else
Unsuccessful
Consuming
Envy
Everybody

More quotes by 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.
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You can never be sure whether you are discovering the truth or inventing it.
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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.
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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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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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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
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But it has been my experience that the risks are faroutweighed by the rewards, chief of which is when you speak to strangers as though they are friends, more often than not, if only for as long as the encounter lasts, they become friends, and if in the process they also think of you as a little peculiar, who cares?
Frederick Buechner
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Five friends I had and two of them snakes.
Frederick Buechner
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The difference to me is not between the believers on one hand and the nonbelievers on the other hand. It's between people who carry in their hearts some sense of what the word God, at least to me, means, which is a loving, creating, everlastingly renewing presence deeply concerned with the well-being of the earth and all its creatures.
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Vocation is the place where the world's greatest need and a person's greatest joy meet.
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Justice is the grammar of things. Mercy is the poetry of things.
Frederick Buechner
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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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No words come easily to my lips. I think ultimately - what I like to think is that I'm in some sense hearing the mystery itself.
Frederick Buechner
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For outlandish creatures like us, on our way to a heart, a brain, and courage, Bethlehem is not the end of our journey but only the beginning - not home but the place through which we must pass if ever we are to reach home at last.
Frederick Buechner
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The life I touch for good or ill will touch another life, and in turn another, until who knows where the trembling stops or in what far place my touch will be felt.
Frederick Buechner
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Faith is not being sure where you're going, but going anyway.
Frederick Buechner
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Maybe at the heart of all our traveling is the dream of someday, somehow, getting Home.
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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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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The first ministers were the twelve disciples. There is no evidence that Jesus chose them because they are brighter or nicer than other people. Their sole qualification seems to have been their initial willingness to rise to their feet when Jesus said, Follow me.
Frederick Buechner