Harry Emerson Fosdick Quotes
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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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No one can be wrong with man and right with God.
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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 life ever grows great until it is focused, dedicated, disciplined.
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Life asks not merely what you can do; it asks how much can you endure and not be spoiled.
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One of the most amazing things ever said on this earth is Jesus's statement: "He that is greatest among you shall be your servant." Nobody has one chance in a billion of being thought really great after a century has passed except those who have been the servants of all. That strange realist from Bethlehem knew that.
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Granted the endless variations of moral customs, still the essential standards persist. As in a scientific laboratory, all else may change but the standards are unalterable- disinterested love of truth, fidelity to facts, accuracy in measurement, exactness of verification-so, in life as a whole, the towering ethical criteria remain unshaken. Falsehood is never better than truth, theft better than than honesty, treachery better than loyalty, cowardice better than courage.
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Hating people is like burning down your own house to get rid of a rat.
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It is magnificent to grow old, if one keeps young.
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Money is a miraculous thing. It is your personal energy reduced to a portable form and endowed with power you yourself do not possess. It can go where you cannot go; speak languages you cannot speak; lift burdens you cannot touch with your fingers; save lives with which you cannot deal directly.
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Friends are necessary to a happy life. When friendship deserts us, we are as helpless as a ship left by the tide high upon the shore. When friendship returns to us, it's as though the tide came back, giving us buoyancy and freedom.
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Some things mankind can finish and be done with, but not ... science, that persists, and changes from ancient Chaldeans studying the stars to a new telescope with a 200-inch reflector and beyond; not religion, that persists, and changes from old credulities and world views to new thoughts of God and larger apprehensions of his meaning.
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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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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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Every failure can be considered as a tragedy or a chance to learn something. The latter is healthier...
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No one can get inner peace by pouncing on it.
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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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It is cynicism and fear that freeze life; it is faith that thaws it out, releases it, sets it free.
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Nothing in human life, least of all in religion, is ever right until it is beautiful.
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No man is the whole of himself; his friends are the rest of him.
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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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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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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 by actions and not by ideas that people really live.