William > William's Quotes

“The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.”
― Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking: A Seeker's ABC

“Turn around and believe that the good news that we are loved is better than we ever dared hope, and that to believe in that good news, to live out of it and toward it, to be in love with that good news, is of all glad things in this world the gladdest thing of all. Amen, and come Lord Jesus.”
― Frederick Buechner, The Clown in the Belfry: Writings on Faith and Fiction

“When you remember me, it means you have carried something of who I am with you, that I have left some mark of who I am on who you are. It means that you can summon me back to your mind even though countless years and miles may stand between us. It means that if we meet again, you will know me. It means that even after I die, you can still see my face and hear my voice and speak to me in your heart.”
― Frederick Buechner

“Compassion is the sometimes fatal capacity for feeling what it is like to live inside somebody else's skin. It's the knowledge that there can never really be any peace and joy for me until there is peace and joy finally for you too. ”
― Frederick Buechner

“The life I touch for good or ill will touch another life, and in turn another, until who knows where the trembling stops or in what far place my touch will be felt.”
― Frederick Buechner, The Hungering Dark

“I believe that what Genesis suggests is that this original self, with the print of God's thumb still upon it, is the most essential part of who we are and is buried deep in all of us as a source of wisdom and strength and healing which we can draw upon or, with our terrible freedom, not draw upon as we choose. I think that among other things all real art comes from that deepest self - painting, writing music, dance, all of it that in some way nourishes the spirit. ”
― Frederick Buechner, Telling Secrets: A Celebrated Author's Candid Memoir of a Father's Suicide and Its Influence on a Son and Minister

“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

“Doubts are the ants in the pants of faith. They keep it awake and moving.”
― Frederick Buechner

“I not only have my secrets, I am my secrets. And you are yours. Our secrets are human secrets, and our trusting each other enough to share them with each other has much to do with the secret of what it means to be human.”
― 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, Wishful Thinking: A Seeker's ABC

“Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.”
― Winston S. Churchill

“It takes a great deal of bravery to stand up to our enemies, but just as much to stand up to our friends.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone

“A ship is safe in harbor, but that's not what ships are for.”
― John A. Shedd

“Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear - not absence of fear.”
― Mark Twain

“Courage is the most important of all the virtues because without courage, you can't practice any other virtue consistently.”
― Maya Angelou