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The trouble with really seeing and really hearing is that then we really have to do something about what we have seen and heard.

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
Trouble
Seen
Seeing
Heard
Something
Really
Hearing

More quotes by 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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If you are going to proclaim the Christian faith, speak about those dimensions of it which you['ve] had some experience with.
Frederick Buechner
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Faith in God is less apt to proceed from miracles than miracles from faith in God.
Frederick Buechner
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The world needs people who save lives.
Frederick Buechner
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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
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Life is grace. Sleep is forgiveness. The night absolves. Darkness wipes the slate clean, not spotless to be sure, but clean enough for another day's chalking.
Frederick Buechner
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Listen to your life. Listen to what happens to you because it is through what happens to you that God speaks...It's in language that's not always easy to decipher, but it's there powerfully, memorably, unforgettably.
Frederick Buechner
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We find by losing. We hold fast by letting go. We become something new by ceasing to be something old.
Frederick Buechner
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Coincidences are God's way of getting our attention.
Frederick Buechner
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Envy is the consuming desire to have everybody else as unsuccessful as you are.
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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At the evening of our day, we shall be judged by our loving.
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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If you have never known the power of God's love, then maybe it is because you have never asked to know it - I mean really asked, expecting an answer.
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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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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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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Stop trying to protect, to rescue, to judge, to manage the lives around you... Remember that the lives of others are not your business. They are their business. They are God's busineess... Even your own life is not your business. It also is God's Business. Leave it to God.
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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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