Frederick Buechner Quotes About Giving

Quotes about: Giving

• Whatever you do with your life-whatever you end up achieving or not achieving-the great gift you have in you to give to the world is the gift of who you alone are; your way of seeing things, and saying things, and feeling about things, that is like nobody else’s. If so much as a single one of you were missing, there would be an empty place at the great feast of life that nobody else in all creation could fill.

  Frederick Buechner

  Giving, Missing, Feelings

• Here and there even in our world, and now and then, even in ourselves, we catch glimpeses of a New Creation, which, fleeting as those glipmses are apt to be, give us hope both for this life and for whatever life may await us later on.

  Frederick Buechner

  Our World, Giving, Here And There

  Frederick Buechner (1983). “Now and Then”, HarperCollins Publishers

• Of the Seven Deadly Sins, anger is possibly the most fun. To lick your wounds, to smack your lips over grievances long past, to roll over your tongue the prospect of bitter confrontations still to come, to savor to the last toothsome morsel both the pain you are given and the pain you are giving back--in many ways it is a feast fit for a king. The chief drawback is that what you are wolfing down is yourself. The skeleton at the feast is you.

  Frederick Buechner

  Kings, Fun, Pain

  FaceBook post by Frederick Buechner from Mar 19, 2014

• The world says, The more you take, the more you have. Christ says, the more you give, the more you are.

  Frederick Buechner

  Giving, World, Christ

• Our stories are all stories of searching. We search for a good self to be and for good work to do. We search to become human in a world that tempts us always to be less than human or looks to us to be more. We search to love and to be loved. And in a world where it is often hard to believe in much of anything, we search to believe in something holy and beautiful and life-transcending that will give meaning and purpose to the lives we live.

  Frederick Buechner

  Beautiful, Believe, Self

  FaceBook post by Frederick Buechner from Sep 13, 2013

• 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

  Giving, Mind, Saint

• 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

  Jesus, Believe, Heart

  Interview with Bob Abernethy, www.pbs.org. April 5, 2006.

• God himself does not give answers. He gives himself.

  Frederick Buechner

  Giving, Doe, Answers

  FaceBook post by Frederick Buechner from Apr 26, 2017

• ON HER DEATHBED, Gertrude Stein is said to have asked, 'What is the answer?' Then, after a long silence, 'What is the question?' Don't start looking in the Bible for the answers it gives. Start by listening for the questions it asks.

  Frederick Buechner

  Long, Giving, Silence

  Frederick Buechner (1973). “Wishful thinking: a theological ABC.”, Harper San Francisco

• Avarice, greed, concupiscence and so forth are all based on the mathematical truism that the more you get, the more you have. The remark of that it is more blessed to give than to receive is based on the human truth that the more you give away in love, the more you are. It is not just for the sake of other people that tells us to give rather than get, but for our own sakes too.

  Frederick Buechner

  Blessed, People, Giving

  FaceBook post by Frederick Buechner from Mar 27, 2014

• They are prepared for a God who strikes hard bargains but not for a God who gives as much for an hour's work as for a day's. They are prepared for a mustard-seed kingdom of God no bigger than the eye of a newt but not for the great banyan it becomes with birds in its branches singing Mozart. They are prepared for the potluck supper at First Presbyterian but not for the marriage supper of the lamb.

  Frederick Buechner

  Eye, Giving, Bird

• Here and there and not just in books we catch glimpses of a world of once upon a time and they lived happily ever after, of a world where there is a wizard to give courage and a heart, an angel with a white stone that has written on it our true and secret name, and it is so easy to dismiss it all that it is hardly worth bothering to do. ... But if the world of the fairy tale and our glimpses of it here and there are only a dream, they are one of the most haunting and powerful dreams that the world has ever dreamed.

  Frederick Buechner

  Dream, Powerful, Book

• That's five friends, one each for Jesu's wounds, and Godric bears their mark still on what's left of him as in their time they all bore his on them. What's friendship, when all's done, but the giving and taking of wounds?

  Frederick Buechner

  Giving, Done, Bears

• The fearsome blessing of that hard time continues to work itself out in my life in the same way we're told the universe is still hurtling through outer space under the impact of the great cosmic explosion.... I think grace sometimes explodes into our lives like that-sending our pain, terror, astonishment hurtling through inner space until by grace they become Orion, Cassiopeia, Polaris to give us our bearings, to bring us into something like full being at last.

  Frederick Buechner

  Pain, Thinking, Hard Times

• If what makes you happy is going out and living it up and spending all your money on wine, women, and song, the world doesn't need that. But on the other hand, if you give your life to good works - you go and work in a leper colony and it doesn't make you happy - the chances are you're not doing it very well.

  Frederick Buechner

  Song, Wine, Hands

  Interview with Bob Abernethy, www.pbs.org. April 5, 2006.

• Through the power that memory gives us of thinking, feeling, imagining our way back through time we can at long last finally finish with the past in the sense of removing its power to hurt us and other people and to stunt our growth as human beings.

  Frederick Buechner

  Hurt, Memories, Past

  Frederick Buechner (1991). “Telling Secrets”, Harper San Francisco

• 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

  Giving Up, Self, Way

  "Frederick Buechner Extended Interview". Interview with Bob Abernethy, www.pbs.org. May 5, 2006.

• To believe in God is to give your heart to God.

  Frederick Buechner

  Believe, Heart, Giving

  Interview with Bob Abernethy, www.pbs.org. April 5, 2006.

• I don't want to give the impression that I'm a great Bible reader. I don't sit down every day and read for an hour through the Bible. But I really do read it with a great deal of pleasure... which is the last thing I would have suspected. So I read it sometimes as a devotional, but really more, not for fun, but because it's fascinating.

  Frederick Buechner

  Fun, Giving, Want

  Source: www.jmm.org.au

• 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

  Believe, Mean, Heart

  Interview with Bob Abernethy, www.pbs.org. April 5, 2006.

• . . . [T]o live not with hands clenched to grasp, to strike, to hold tight to a life that is always slipping away the more tightly we hold it, but . . . to live with the hands stretched out both to give and receive with gladness.

  Frederick Buechner

  Peace, Hands, Giving

• ... the world can give you these glimpses as well as fairy tales can--the smell of rain, the dazzle of sun on white clapboard with the shadows of ferns and wash on the line, the wildness of a winter storm when in the house the flame of a candle doesn't even flicker.

  Frederick Buechner

  Rain, Winter, Flames

• I don't think Christ would give a hoot whether you mentioned Christ to them or not. What matters - I'm speaking arrogantly and absurdly - to him is, are you living the kind of life that I embodied? Whether you believe in Christ or don't, who cares?

  Frederick Buechner

  Believe, Thinking, What Matters

  Interview with Bob Abernethy, www.pbs.org. April 5, 2006.

• I'm not religious in the sense that I do not subscribe to any particular set of religious dogma. I don't go to church. I don't read the Bible. But I believe that the word "Spirit" with a capital S points to an ultimate reality which I give my heart to.

  Frederick Buechner

  Religious, Believe, Heart

  Interview with Bob Abernethy, www.pbs.org. April 5, 2006.

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