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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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Frederick Buechner
Age: 98
Born: 1926
Born: July 11
Autobiographer
Novelist
Poet
Theologian
Writer
New York City
New York
Carl Frederick Buechner
Thinking
Experience
Rewards
Encounter
Become
Risk
Risks
Also
Though
Encounters
Care
Friends
Cares
Littles
Lasts
Chief
Little
Process
Chiefs
Long
Often
Peculiar
Think
Speak
Stranger
Strangers

More quotes by 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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God himself does not give answers. He gives himself.
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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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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If you talk about sin, you don't have to use the first person singular, but speak out of that part of yourself which knows what it means to become estranged from people you love. Speak in your own voice about things that you in your own life have in one way or another experienced.
Frederick Buechner
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the story of any one of us is in some measure the story of us all
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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...words are not only meaning but music and magic and power.
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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Beneath the worst the world can do, there is always the glimmer of the best.
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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If preachers decide to preach about hope, let them preach out of what they themselves hope for.
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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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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Remember Jesus of Nazareth, staggering on broken feet out of the tomb toward the Resurrection, bearing on his body the proud insignia of the defeat which is victory, the magnificent defeat of the human soul at the hands of God.
Frederick Buechner
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To believe in God is to give your heart to God.
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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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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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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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