Harry Emerson Fosdick Quotes
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No life ever grows great until it is focused, dedicated, disciplined.
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A good sermon is an engineering operation by which a chasm is bridged so that the spiritual goods on one side-the 'unsearchable riches of Christ' - are actually transported into personal lives upon the other.
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It is magnificent to grow old, if one keeps young.
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No one can get inner peace by pouncing on it, by vigorously willing to have it ... Peace is a consciousness of springs too deep for earthly droughts to dry up. Peace is the gift not of volitional struggle but of spiritual hospitality.
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One of the strange phenomena of the last century is the spectacle of religion dropping the appeal of fear while other human interests have picked it up.
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He who cannot rest, cannot work; he who cannot let go, cannot hold on; he who cannot find footing, cannot go forward.
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He is a poor son whose sonship does not make him desire to serve all men's mothers.
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It is not marriage that fails; it is people that fail. All that marriage does is to show people up.
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It is going to be a long, hard haul; it will require patience, courage, faith that hangs on when hope fails, if we are to tame the rude barbarity of man, so that the atomic age becomes a blessing, not a curse. There never was such a day for the Christian gospel. God help us all in these years ahead to make that gospel live in men and nations!
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Democracy is based upon the conviction that there are extraordinary possibilities in ordinary people.
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No horse gets anywhere until he is harnessed. No stream or gas drives anything until it is confined. No Niagara is ever turned into light and power until it is tunneled. No life ever grows great until it is focused, dedicated, disciplined.
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Life is like a library owned by the author. In it are a few books which he wrote himself, but most of them were written for him.
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We cannot all be great, but we can always attach ourselves to something that is great.
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Life consists not simply in what heredity and environment do to us, but in what we make out of what they do to us.
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Prayer opens our lives for God so his will can be done in and through us, because in true prayer we habitually put ourselves into the attitude of willingness to do whatever God wills.
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Bitterness imprisons life; love releases it. Bitterness paralyzes life; love empowers it. Bitterness sours life; love sweetens it. Bitterness sickens life; love heals it. Bitterness blinds life; love anoints its eyes.
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I renounce war for its consequences, for the lies it lives on and propagates, for the undying hatred it arouses, for the dictatorships it puts in place of democracy, for the starvation that stalks after it. I renounce war, and never again, directly or indirectly, will I sanction or support another.
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The more we know about this universe, the more mysterious it is. The old world that Job knew was marvelous enough, and his description of its wonders is among the noblest poetry of the race, but today the new science has opened to our eyes vistas of mystery that transcend in their inexplicable marvel anything the ancients ever dreamed.
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No one can get inner peace by pouncing on it.
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Christians are supposed not merely to endure change, nor even to profit by it, but to cause it.
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All altruism springs from putting yourself in the other person's place.
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He who picks up one end of a stick picks up the other. He who chooses the beginning of a road chooses the place it leads to. It is the means that determine the end.
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It is by actions and not by ideas that people really live.
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The stars are not so strange as the mind that studies them, analyzes their light, and measures their distance.