What can we learn from the life of Frederick Buechner? That’s a question worth pondering, especially if you’re an entrepreneur. After all, Buechner was a successful businessman and author who achieved great things despite tremendous adversity. In this blog post, we’ll take a closer look at his life and see what lessons we can glean from it.
Discover the most known Human Beings, Life, Believing, World, Deep, Heart quotes from Frederick Buechner, and much more.
Born:
July 11, 1926
Occupation:
Author, Presbyterian Minister
Nationality:
American
Alma Mater:
The Lawrenceville School Princeton University Union Theological Seminary
Genre:
Novel, Short Story, Essay, Sermon, Autobiography, Historical Fiction
Notable Works:
A Long Day’s Dying, Secrets In The Dark, Godric, The Book Of Bebb, The Sacred Journey: A Memoir Of Early Days, The Magnificent Defeat And More.
Notable Awards:
O. Henry Award, The Rosenthal Award, The Christianity And Literature Belles Lettres Prize
Don’t let your life just go in one eye and out the other. — Frederick Buechner
The world needs people who save lives. — Frederick Buechner
Listen to your life. All moments are key moments. — Frederick Buechner
The birth of Jesus made possible not just a new way of understanding life but a new way of living it. — Frederick Buechner
We are in constant danger of being not actors in the drama of our own lives but reactors. — Frederick Buechner
Your vocation in life is where your greatest joy meets the world’s greatest need. — Frederick Buechner
Life without death has become as unthinkable to me as day without night or waking without sleep. — Frederick Buechner
Listen. Your life is happening. You are happening. Think back on your journey. The music of your life… — Frederick Buechner
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
Your life and my life flow into each other as wave flows into wave, and unless there is peace and joy and freedom for you, there can be no real peace or joy or freedom for me. — Frederick Buechner
True faith, a simple life, a helping hand–the three things prized most in Heaven. — Frederick Buechner
I don’t know how to save my own life, so anything they’ve found in what I’ve written that saved theirs–I can’t take responsibility for it. — Frederick Buechner
What’s lost is nothing to what’s found, and all the death that ever was, set next to life, would scarcely fill a cup. — Frederick Buechner
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
In other words to live Eternal Life in the full and final sense is to be with God as Christ is with him, and with each other as Christ is with us. — Frederick Buechner
Pay mind to your own life, your own health, and wholeness. A bleeding heart is of no help to anyone if it bleeds to death. — Frederick Buechner
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
The life thatI touch for good or ill will touch another life, and that in turn another, until who knows where the trembling stops or in what far place my touch will be felt. — Frederick Buechner
You can’t be too careful what you tell a child because you never know what he’ll take hold of and spend the rest of his life remembering you by. — Frederick Buechner
To believe in God is to give your heart to God. — Frederick Buechner
When a man leaves home, he leaves behind some scrap of his heart. . . . It’s the same with a place a man is going to. Only then he sends a scrap of his heart ahead. — Frederick Buechner
Maybe at the heart of all our traveling is the dream of someday, somehow, getting Home. — Frederick Buechner
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
O thou who art the sparrow’s friend,’ he said, ‘have mercy on this world that knows not even when it sins. O holy dove, descend and roost on Godric here so that a heart may hatch in him at last. Amen — Frederick Buechner
Words spoken in deep love or deep hate set things in motion in the human heart that can never be reversed. — Frederick Buechner
Vocation is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet. — Frederick Buechner
Your vocation lies in the intersection of the world’s deep need and your deep joy. — Frederick Buechner
Vocation is the place where our deep gladness meets the world’s deep need. — Frederick Buechner
The place to which God calls you is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet. — Frederick Buechner
The Jesus I follow is the peacemaker, is one who says forgive your enemies, who worries about the poor, who worries about the poorest of the poor instead of the richest of the rich. — Frederick Buechner
Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don’t be afraid. — Frederick Buechner
Beneath the worst the world can do, there is always the glimmer of the best. — Frederick Buechner
The world speaks of holy things in the only language it knows, which is worldly language. — Frederick Buechner
The world says, The more you take, the more you have. Christ says, the more you give, the more you are. — Frederick Buechner
Your calling is where your own greatest joy intersects with the needs of the world. — Frederick Buechner
I’m trying to listen to my past, listen to what’s most deeply going on inside myself, my creative set of fictional characters, a fictional world–to listen to that world, to search. — Frederick Buechner
Where your deep gladness meets with the deep hunger of the world, there you will find a further calling. — Frederick Buechner
In his holy flirtation with the world, God occasionally drops a handkerchief. These handkerchiefs are called saints. — Frederick Buechner
We are in constant danger of being not actors in the drama of our lives but reactors, to go where the world takes us, to drift with whatever current happens to be running the strongest. — Frederick Buechner
What keeps the wild hope of Christmas alive year after year in a world notorious for dashing all hopes is the haunting dream that the child who was born that day may yet be born again even in us. — Frederick Buechner
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
Sin and grace, absence and presence, tragedy and comedy, they divide the world between them and where they meet head on, the Gospel happens. — Frederick Buechner
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
Lord, I believe; help my unbelief’ is the best any of us can do really, but thank God it is enough. — Frederick Buechner
I find I need to put things into words before I can believe that they are entirely real. — Frederick Buechner
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
People are disturbed not by things but by the view they take of them. They may forget what you said, but they will never forget how you made them feel. — Frederick Buechner
You can survive on your own; you can grow strong on your own; you can prevail on your own; but you cannot become human on your own. — Frederick Buechner
What deadens us most to God’s presence within us, I think, is the inner dialogue that we are continually engaged in with ourselves, the endless chatter of human thought. — Frederick Buechner
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
The best moments any of us have as human beings are those moments when for a little while it is possible to escape the squirrel–cage of being me into the landscape of being us. — Frederick Buechner
If our pain doesn’t destroy us, it just might transform us into truly human beings at last. — Frederick Buechner
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
Words are in a way our godly sharing in the work of creation, and the speaking and writing of words is at once the most human and the most holy business we engage in. — Frederick Buechner
The real turning point in human history is less apt to be the day the wheel is invented or Rome falls than the day a boy is born to a couple of hick Jews. — Frederick Buechner
Frederick Buechner is a master of words, and his quotes on creativity offer inspiration to any writer or artist. If you’re feeling stuck, read these quotes and be reminded that creation is possible in the face of doubt. And if you need a little more help getting started, check out our courses. We can teach you how to find your creative voice and use it to share your stories with the world.
