Frederick Buechner quote: "Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery that it is. In the boredom and pain of it no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it because in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace."

Religion points to that area of human experience where in one way or another man comes upon myster...
FREDERICK BUECHNER

Something terrible happens, and you might say, "God help us!", or "Jesus Christ!" -- the poor, cripp...
FREDERICK BUECHNER

According to Jesus, by far the most important thing about praying is to keep at it... Be importunate...
FREDERICK BUECHNER

Pay mind to your own life, your own health, and wholeness. A bleeding heart is of no help to anyone ...
FREDERICK BUECHNER

And now brothers, I will ask you a terrible question, and God knows I ask it also of myself. Is the ...
FREDERICK BUECHNER

Everybody prays whether you think of it as praying or not. The odd silence you fall into when someth...
FREDERICK BUECHNER

A miracle is when the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. A miracle is when one plus one equ...
FREDERICK BUECHNER

Of the seven deadly sins, anger is possibly the most fun. To lick your wounds, to smack your lips ov...
FREDERICK BUECHNER

Your life and my life flow into each other as wave flows into wave, and unless there is peace and jo...
FREDERICK BUECHNER

When you remember me, it means that you have carried something of who I am with you, that I have lef...
FREDERICK BUECHNER

Whether your faith is that there is a God or that there is not a God, if you don't have any doubts y...
FREDERICK BUECHNER

The grace of God means something like: Here is your life. You might never have been, but you are bec...
FREDERICK BUECHNER

Compassion is sometimes the fatal capacity for feeling what it is like to live inside somebody else'...
FREDERICK BUECHNER

In his holy flirtation with the world, God occasionally drops a handkerchief. These handkerchiefs ar...
FREDERICK BUECHNER

Life is grace. Sleep is forgiveness. The night absolves. Darkness wipes the slate clean, not spotles...
FREDERICK BUECHNER

If it seems a childish thing to do, do it in remembrance that you are a child.
FREDERICK BUECHNER

It is as impossible for man to demonstrate the existence of God as it would be for even Sherlock Hol...
FREDERICK BUECHNER

Religion points to that area of human experience where in one way or another man comes upon mystery ...
FREDERICK BUECHNER

If we are to love our neighbors, before doing anything else we must see our neighbors. With our imag...
FREDERICK BUECHNER

Remember Jesus of Nazareth, staggering on broken feet out of the tomb toward the Resurrection, beari...
FREDERICK BUECHNER

Lust is the craving for salt of a man who is dying of thirst
FREDERICK BUECHNER

In his holy flirtation with the world, God occasionally drops a handkerchief. These handkerchiefs ...
FREDERICK BUECHNER

The time is ripe for looking back over the day, the week, the year, and trying to figure out where w...
FREDERICK BUECHNER

When you remember me, it means that you have carried something of who I am with you, that I have lef...
FREDERICK BUECHNER

Go where your best prayers take you.
FREDERICK BUECHNER

You can kiss your family and friends good-bye and put miles between you, but at the same time you ca...
FREDERICK BUECHNER

Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery it is. In the boredom and pain of it, no less...
FREDERICK BUECHNER

Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don't be afraid.
FREDERICK BUECHNER

The fatted calf, the best Scotch, the hoedown could all have been his too, any time he asked for the...
FREDERICK BUECHNER

The grace of God means something like: Here is your life. You might never have been, but you are b...
FREDERICK BUECHNER

When you remember me, it means that you have carried something of who I am with you, that I have lef...
FREDERICK BUECHNER

Turn around and believe that the good news that we are loved is better than we ever dared hope, and ...
FREDERICK BUECHNER

Everybody prays whether [you think] of it as praying or not. The odd silence you fall into when some...
FREDERICK BUECHNER

You can't be too careful what you tell a child because you never know what he'll take hold of and sp...
FREDERICK BUECHNER

[A true atheist is one who is willing to face the full consequences of what it means to say there is...
FREDERICK BUECHNER

In the entire history of the universe, let alone in your own history, there has never been another d...
FREDERICK BUECHNER

What we hunger for perhaps more than anything else is to be known in our full humanness, and yet tha...
FREDERICK BUECHNER

Doubts are the ants in the pants of faith. They keep it awake and moving.
FREDERICK BUECHNER

The storyteller's claim, I believe, is that life has meaning—that the things that happen to people...
FREDERICK BUECHNER

There is little we can point to in our lives as deserving anything but God's wrath. Our best moments...
FREDERICK BUECHNER

We try so hard as Christians. We think such long thoughts, manipulate such long words, and both list...
FREDERICK BUECHNER

In honesty you have to admit to a wise man that prayer is not for the wise, not for the prudent, not...
FREDERICK BUECHNER

It is not objective proof of God's existence that we want but, whether we use religious language for...
FREDERICK BUECHNER

There is always the poet, the lunatic, the lover; there is always the religious man who is a queer m...
FREDERICK BUECHNER

And because God's love is uncoercive and treasures our freedom - if above all he wants us to love hi...
FREDERICK BUECHNER

Like Adam, we have all lost Paradise; and yet we carry Paradise around inside of us in the form of a...
FREDERICK BUECHNER

If we are to believe he is really alive with all that that implies, then we have to believe without ...
FREDERICK BUECHNER

We are children, perhaps, at the very moment when we know that it is as children that God loves us -...
FREDERICK BUECHNER

Lord, I believe; help my unbelief' is the best any of us can do really, but thank God it is enough.
FREDERICK BUECHNER

Faith is stepping out into the unknown with nothing to guide us but a hand just beyond our grasp.
FREDERICK BUECHNER

Your life and my life flow into each other as wave flows into wave, and unless there is peace and jo...
FREDERICK BUECHNER

If you have never known the power of God's love, then maybe it is because you have never asked to kn...
FREDERICK BUECHNER

For outlandish creatures like us, on our way to a heart, a brain, and courage, Bethlehem is not the ...
FREDERICK BUECHNER

The love for equals is a human thing--of friend for friend, brother for brother. It is to love what ...
FREDERICK BUECHNER

Our father. We have killed him, and we will kill him again, and our world will kill him. And yet he ...
FREDERICK BUECHNER

God himself does not give answers. He gives himself.
FREDERICK BUECHNER

The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.
FREDERICK BUECHNER

There is a fragrance in the air, a certain passage of a song, an old photograph falling out from the...
FREDERICK BUECHNER

Matthew lists Rahab as one of the ancestresses of the Lord Jesus Christ (Matthew 1:5), and that may ...
FREDERICK BUECHNER

The Faces of Jesus
FREDERICK BUECHNER

Laugh till you weep. Weep till there’s nothing left but to laugh at your weeping. In the end it’...
FREDERICK BUECHNER

God in his unending greatness and glory and man in his unending littleness, prepared for the worst b...
FREDERICK BUECHNER

If we are a people who pray, darkness is apt to be a lot of what our prayers are about. If we are pe...
FREDERICK BUECHNER

You use your real voice with those you love, and you cannot be phony with those who know you well.
FREDERICK BUECHNER

The Shield was another of the Fear's names. According to Laughter, it means he shields the seed of A...
FREDERICK BUECHNER

We weren't born yesterday. We are from [New York]. But we are also from somewhere else. We are from ...
FREDERICK BUECHNER

Here and there and not just in books we catch glimpses of a world of once upon a time and they lived...
FREDERICK BUECHNER

... the world can give you these glimpses as well as fairy tales can--the smell of rain, the dazzle ...
FREDERICK BUECHNER

You wake up on a winter morning and pull up the shade, and what lay there the evening before is no l...
FREDERICK BUECHNER

It is a world of magic and mystery, of deep darkness and flickering starlight. It is a world where t...
FREDERICK BUECHNER

Or I think of breathing - the body in its wisdom taking its sustenance out of the air even when the ...
FREDERICK BUECHNER

We cannot make ourselves known to each other; we are not healed and forgiven by each other’s prese...
FREDERICK BUECHNER

Not the least of my problems is that I can hardly even imagine what kind of an experience a genuine,...
FREDERICK BUECHNER

The world is in pain, and its pain makes strangers of us all and ties my tongue in a lover’s knot.
FREDERICK BUECHNER

Come unto me. Come unto me, you say. All right then, dear my Lord. I will try in my own absurd way. ...
FREDERICK BUECHNER

Thus, when you wake up in the morning, called by God to be a self again, if you want to know who you...
FREDERICK BUECHNER

Sometimes the things that do not quite happen in your life count for more than the things that do.
FREDERICK BUECHNER

Maybe it's all utterly meaningless. Maybe it's all unutterably meaningful. If you want to know which...
FREDERICK BUECHNER

I have come to believe that by and large the human family all has the same secrets, which are both v...
FREDERICK BUECHNER

Remember that the lives of other people are not your business. They are their business. They are God...
FREDERICK BUECHNER

Stop trying to protect, to rescue, to judge, to manage the lives around you . . . remember that the ...
FREDERICK BUECHNER

Commemoration of Giles of Provence, Hermit, c.710 To do for yourself the best that you have it i...
FREDRICK BUECHNER

The simplest explanation is that it doesn't make sense.
WILLIAM BUECHNER

The simplest explanation is that it doesn't make sense.
PROFESSOR WILLIAM BUECHNER

They may forget what you said, but they will never forget how you made them feel.
CARL W. BUECHNER

Tears are words the heart can't express
CARL W. BUECHNER

They may forget what you said, but they will never forget how you made them feel. A man is too apt t...
CARL W. BUECHNER

To wish you were someone else is to waste the person you are.
CARL W. BUECHNER

One day your life will flash before your eyes. Make sure its worth watching.
CARL W. BUECHNER

People are disturbed not by things but by the view they take of them.They may forget what you said, ...
CARL W. BUECHNER

The only real failure in life is the failure to try.
CARL W. BUECHNER

Many of the great achievements of the world were accomplished by tired and discouraged men who kept ...
CARL W. BUECHNER

The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.
FREDERICK DOUGLASS

Whether you're a newspaper journalist, a lawyer, a doctor. You have to organize your thoughts.
FREDERICK WISEMAN

Everybody has asked the question, and they learned to ask it early of the abolitionists, 'What s...
FREDERICK DOUGLASS

Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have the exact measure of the injustice...
FREDERICK DOUGLASS

That which is inhuman cannot be divine.
FREDERICK DOUGLASS

The life of the nation is secure only while the nation is honest, truthful, and virtuous.
FREDERICK DOUGLASS

At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed.
FREDERICK DOUGLASS

Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.
FREDERICK DOUGLASS

What to the Slave is the 4th of July.
FREDERICK DOUGLASS

I didn't know I was a slave until I found out I couldn't do the things I wanted.
FREDERICK DOUGLASS

One's liberty should end when it becomes the curse of his neighbor.
FREDERICK FARRAR

Experience proves that those are oftenest abused who can be abused with the greatest impunity. Men ...
FREDERICK DOUGLASS

Power concedes nothing without a demand.
FREDERICK DOUGLASS

A man without force, is without the essential dignity of humanity. Human nature is so constituted, ...
FREDERICK DOUGLASS

Whenever my condition was improved, instead of its increasing my contentment, it only increased my ...
FREDERICK DOUGLASS

If there is no struggle there is no progress.
FREDERICK DOUGLASS

Softly the loud peal dies, In passing winds it drowns, But breathes, like perfect joys, Tender tones...
FREDERICK TENNYSON

"Kill Japs, Kill Japs, Kill more Japs!'
ADMIRAL FREDERICK

The Third Fleet's sunken and damaged ships have been salvaged and are retiring at high speed toward ...
ADMIRAL FREDERICK

Kill Japs, Kill Japs, Kill more Japs!
ADMIRAL FREDERICK

There aren't any great men. There are just great challenges that ordinary men like you and me are fo...
ADMIRAL FREDERICK

Before we're done with them, the Japanese language will be spoken only in Hell!
ADMIRAL FREDERICK

I never trust a fighting man who doesnt smoke or drink.
ADMIRAL FREDERICK

There are no great men. Just great challenges which ordinary men,out of necessity, are forced by cir...
ADMIRAL FREDERICK

There are no extraordinary men...just extraordinary circumstances that ordinary men are forced to de...
ADMIRAL FREDERICK

For it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the ...
FREDERICK DOUGLASS

If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate a...
FREDERICK DOUGLASS

I recognize the Republican party as the sheet anchor of the colored mans political hopes and the ark...
FREDERICK DOUGLASS

I knew that however bad the Republican party was, the Democratic party was much worse. The elements ...
FREDERICK DOUGLASS

A little learning, indeed, may be a dangerous thing, but the want of learning is a calamity to any ...
FREDERICK DOUGLASS

Pride, like laudanum and other poisonous medicines, is beneficial in small, though injurious in larg...
FREDERICK SAUNDERS

I prefer to be true to myself, even at the hazard of incurring the ridicule of others, rather than t...
FREDERICK DOUGLASS

In thinking of America, I sometimes find myself admiring her bright blue sky — her grand old woods...
FREDERICK DOUGLASS

We have to do with the past only as we can make it useful to the present and the future.
FREDERICK DOUGLASS

If you keep working at it, in the last analysis, you win. They've got to kill us a hundred times. Al...
FREDERICK SMITH

Two men look out the same prison bars; one sees mud and the other stars.
FREDERICK LANGBRIDGE

The roads we take are more important than the goals we announce. Decisions determine destiny.
FREDERICK SPEAKMAN

The soul that is within me no man can degrade.
FREDERICK DOUGLASS

Man's greatness consists in his ability to do and the proper application of his powers to things nee...
FREDERICK DOUGLASS

Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one clas...
FREDERICK DOUGLASS

Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plow...
FREDERICK DOUGLASS

A gentleman will not insult me, and no man not a gentleman can insult me.
FREDERICK DOUGLASS

One's liberty should end when it becomes the curse of his neighbor.
FREDERICK FARRAR

Man?s power of choice enables him to think like an angel or a devil, a king or a slave. Whatever he ...
FREDERICK BAILES

Progress always involves risk; you can't steal second base and keep your foot on first.
FREDERICK WILCOX

The soul that is within me no man can degrade.
FREDERICK DOUGLAS

Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want rain without thun...
FREDERICK DOUGLASS

We tend to forget that happiness doesn't come as a result of getting something we don't have, but ra...
FREDERICK KEONIG

The key to your universe is that you can choose.
CARL FREDERICK

A little learning, indeed, may be a dangerous thing, but the want of learning is a calamity to an...
FREDERICK DOUGLASS

Softly the loud peal dies, In passing winds it drowns, But breathes, like perfect joys, ...
FREDERICK TENNYSON

We have no right to ask when a sorrow comes, 'Why did this happen to me?' unless we ask the same que...
FREDERICK KEONIG

I do my thing and you do yours. I am not in this world to live up to your expectations, and you are ...
FREDERICK PERLS

The white man's happiness cannot be purchased by the black man's misery.
FREDERICK DOUGLASS

A doctrine capable of being stated only in obscure and involved terms is open to reasonable suspicio...
FREDERICK POLLOCK

What would it profit thee to be the first Of echoes, tho thy tongue should live forever, A thi...
FREDERICK TENNYSON

Fear of failure must never be a reason not to try something.
FREDERICK SMITH

The only real failure in life is the failure to try.
FREDERICK SMITH

Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are people who want crops without p...
FREDERICK DOUGLASS

Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plo...
FREDERICK DOUGLASS

Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plow...
FREDERICK DOUGLASS

Now whatever the origin of this apparently meaningless jumble of ideas may have been, it is really a...
FREDERICK SODDY

No man can put a chain about the ankle of his fellow man without at last finding the other end faste...
FREDERICK DOUGLASS

Scientific research is one of the most exciting and rewarding of occupations.
FREDERICK SANGER

The white man's happiness cannot be purchased by the black man's misery.
FREDERICK DOUGLASS

To suppress free speech is a double wrong. It violates the rights of the hearer as well as those of ...
FREDERICK DOUGLASS

My early childhood memories center around this typical American country store and life in a small Am...
FREDERICK REINES

It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.
FREDERICK DOUGLASS

It is not light that we need, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm,...
FREDERICK DOUGLASS

The thing worse than rebellion is the thing that causes rebellion.
FREDERICK DOUGLASS

After taking my B.A. degree in 1939 I remained at the University for a further year to take an advan...
FREDERICK SANGER

Without a struggle, there can be no progress.
FREDERICK DOUGLASS

A little learning, indeed, may be a dangerous thing, but the want of learning is a calamity to any p...
FREDERICK DOUGLASS

Slaves are generally expected to sing as well as to work.
FREDERICK DOUGLASS

I am a Republican, a black, dyed in the wool Republican, and I never intend to belong to any other p...
FREDERICK DOUGLASS

I prayed for twenty years but received no answer until I prayed with my legs.
FREDERICK DOUGLASS

One and God make a majority.
FREDERICK DOUGLASS

As the chapters took shape, a change came over her. It was the double-sided recognition that this bo...
FREDERICK WEISEL

These hands which stretch out, implore, beg, then rise to the head in a gesture of calamity.
FREDERICK LEBOYER

Nature is in austere mood, even terrifying, withal majestically beautiful.
FREDERICK SODDY

America is false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the fu...
FREDERICK DOUGLASS

To-day it appears as though it may well be altogether abolished in the future as it has to some exte...
FREDERICK SODDY

I recognize the Republican party as the sheet anchor of the colored man's political hopes and th...
FREDERICK DOUGLASS

Man's greatness consists in his ability to do and the proper application of his powers to things...
FREDERICK DOUGLASS

It is like a voyage of discovery into unknown lands, seeking not for new territory but for new knowl...
FREDERICK SANGER

A battle lost or won is easily described, understood, and appreciated, but the moral growth of a gre...
FREDERICK DOUGLASS

I could, as a free man, look across the bay toward the Eastern Shore where I was born a slave.
FREDERICK DOUGLASS

There is not a man beneath the canopy of Heaven who does not know that slavery is wrong for him.
FREDERICK DOUGLASS

A good scientist is a person in whom the childhood quality of perennial curiosity lingers on. Once h...
FREDERICK SEITZ

I didn't know I was a slave until I found out I couldn't do the things I wanted
FREDERICK DOUGLASS

In thinking of America, I sometimes find myself admiring her bright blue sky-her grand old woods-her...
FREDERICK DOUGLASS

The white man's happiness cannot be purchased by the black man's misery.
FREDERICK DOUGLASS

Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one clas...
FREDERICK DOUGLASS

But when ye come, and all the flowers are dying,
If I am dead, as dead I well may be,
You'...
FREDERICK WEATHERLY

The pure air and dazzling snow belong to things beyond the reach of all personal feeling, almost bey...
FREDERICK SODDY

Progress always involves risk; you can't steal second base and keep your foot on first.
FREDERICK WILCOX

We will by conscious command evolve cerebral centers which will permit us to use powers that we now ...
FREDERICK TILNEY

The roads we take are more important than the goals we announce. Decisions determine destiny.
FREDERICK SPEAKMAN

There is only one real failure in life that is possible, and that is not to be true to the best we k...
FREDERICK FARRAR

Man’s power of choice enables him to think like an angel or a devil, a king or a slave. Whatever h...
FREDERICK BAILES

You have to edit the material. That assumes that some kind of a mind is operating in relation to the...
FREDERICK WISEMAN

The white man's happiness cannot be purchased by the black man's misery
FREDERICK DOUGLASS

Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any peop...
FREDERICK DOUGLASS

Nonsense is to sense, as shade to light; it heightens effect
FREDERICK SAUNDERS

People might not get all they work for in this world, but they must certainly work for all they get.
FREDERICK DOUGLASS

If there is no struggle, there is no progress.
FREDERICK DOUGLASS

Do you suffer your thoughts to tamper with evil; and to dally with wrong-doing? If so; you are not s...
FREDERICK FARRAR

Two men look out through the same bars: One sees the mud and one the stars.
FREDERICK LANGBRIDGE

Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery that it is. In the boredom and pain of it no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it because in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace.

Frederick Buechner

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