Quote

I believe with the best of who I am in God, but I sometimes think if anybody would watch me and [they] didn't believe a damn thing, they would have a very hard time deciding which of us is which.

Frederick Buechner

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Frederick Buechner
Age: 98
Born: 1926
Born: July 11
Autobiographer
Novelist
Poet
Theologian
Writer
New York City
New York
Carl Frederick Buechner
Thing
Damn
Believe
Anybody
Would
Watches
Time
Watch
Think
Didn
Thinking
Best
Hard
Sometimes
Deciding

More quotes by Frederick Buechner

Image
Justice is the grammar of things. Mercy is the poetry of things.
Frederick Buechner
Image
Lust is the craving for salt of a man who is dying of thirst.
Frederick Buechner
Image
Remember me not for the ill I've done but for the good I've dreamed.
Frederick Buechner
Image
The past is the place we view the present from as much as the other way around.
Frederick Buechner
Image
For as long as you remember me, I am never entirely lost.
Frederick Buechner
Image
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
Image
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.
Frederick Buechner
Image
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
Image
It's very easy in a way, horrible in some ways, but simply to give up the whole thing, to say, Well, the hell with it, as far as I'm concerned life is pointless and [so] live the fullest, most successfully self-fulfilling life you can and let the rest go hang - I've never reached that point in my life.
Frederick Buechner
Image
The grace of God means something like: Here is your life. You might never have been, but you are because the party wouldn't have been complete without you.
Frederick Buechner
Image
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
Image
A God in the hand is worth two in the bush.
Frederick Buechner
Image
Beneath the worst the world can do, there is always the glimmer of the best.
Frederick Buechner
Image
if you don't have doubts you're either kidding yourself or asleep. Doubts are the ants-in-the-pants of faith. They keep it alive and moving.
Frederick Buechner
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Doubts are the ants in the pants of faith. They keep it awake and moving.
Frederick Buechner
Image
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
Image
I was deeply influenced by an Episcopal laywoman named Agnes Sanford, who in her day was quite famous as a faith healer, which is a term I've always distrusted, because it conjures up charlatanry. She was not a charlatan. She was the real thing, and she had had remarkable healings.
Frederick Buechner
Image
To be a saint is to be a little out of one's mind, which is a very good thing to be a little out of from time to time. It is to live a life that is always giving itself away and yet is always full.
Frederick Buechner