Top 85 Harry Emerson Fosdick Quotes
#1. Divinity is not something supernatural that ever and again invades the natural order in a crashing miracle. Divinity is not in some remote heaven, seated on a throne. Divinity is love ... Wherever goodness, beauty, truth, love, are-there is the divine.
Harry Emerson Fosdick
#2. No steam or gas drives anything until it is confined. No life ever grows great until it is focused, dedicated, and disciplined.
Harry Emerson Fosdick
#3. Self-pity gets you nowhere. But insight to see that something can be done with the second-bests and adventurous daring to try might be a handle to take hold of.
Harry Emerson Fosdick
#4. 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.
Harry Emerson Fosdick
#5. 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.
Harry Emerson Fosdick
#6. Picture yourself vividly as winning, and that alone will contribute immeasurably to success.
Harry Emerson Fosdick
#9. Democracy is not simply a political system; it is a moral movement and it springs from adventurous faith in human possibilities.
Harry Emerson Fosdick
#10. The steady discipline of intimate friendship with Jesus results in men becoming like Him.
Harry Emerson Fosdick
#12. Christians are supposed not merely to endure change, nor even to profit by it, but to cause it.
Harry Emerson Fosdick
#14. While each of us ... has depressed hours, none of us needs to be a depressed person.
Harry Emerson Fosdick
#15. Every failure can be considered as a tragedy or a chance to learn something. The latter is healthier
Harry Emerson Fosdick
#16. When you hear a person say, "I hate," adding the name of some race, nation, religion, or social class, you are dealing with a belated mind. That person may dress like a modern, ride in an automobile, listen to the radio, but his or her mind is properly dated about 1000 B.C.
Harry Emerson Fosdick
#18. Great living starts with a picture, held in your imagination, of what you would like to do or be.
Harry Emerson Fosdick
#19. Every year the inventions of science weave more inextricably the web that binds man to man, group to group, nation to nation.
Harry Emerson Fosdick
#22. Nothing in this world is more inspiring than a soul up against crippling circumstances who carries it off with courage and faith and undefeated character-nothing! See Light From Many Lamps, edited by L. E. Watson, article by H. E. Fosdick, pp. 93-94 re: a serious cripple who succeeded.
Harry Emerson Fosdick
#23. It is cynicism and fear that freeze life; it is faith that thaws it out, releases it, sets it free.
Harry Emerson Fosdick
#24. One could almost phrase the motto of our modern civilization thus: Science is my shepherd; I shall not want.
Harry Emerson Fosdick
#25. We cannot restore integrity and morality to our society until each of us-singly and individually-takes responsibility for our actions.
Harry Emerson Fosdick
#26. Religion is something that only secondarily can be taught. It must must primarily be taught.
Harry Emerson Fosdick
#27. In the foothills of the Himalayas, one hears the prayer: "Oh Lord, we know not what is good for us. You know what it is. For it we pray."
Harry Emerson Fosdick
#28. I hate war ... for the dictatorships it puts in the place of democracies, and for the starvation that stalks after it.
Harry Emerson Fosdick
#29. The process has now run full circle: Preaching originates in personal counseling; preaching is personal counseling on a group basis; personal counseling originates in preaching. Personal counseling imparts to the preacher a practical familiarity with human nature which he would not otherwise obtain.
Harry Emerson Fosdick
#30. The fact that astronomies change while the stars abide is a true analogy of every realm of human life and thought, religion not least of all. No existent theology can be a final formulation of spiritual truth.
Harry Emerson Fosdick
#31. Every great scientist becomes a great scientist because of the inner self-abnegation with which he stands before truth, saying: "Not my will, but thine, be done." What, then, does a man mean by saying, Science displaces religion, when in this deep sense science itself springs from religion?
Harry Emerson Fosdick
#33. 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.
Harry Emerson Fosdick
#34. He is a poor son whose sonship does not make him desire to serve all men's mothers.
Harry Emerson Fosdick
#35. Democracy is based upon the conviction that there are extraordinary possibilities in ordinary people.
Harry Emerson Fosdick
#36. The all but unanimous judgment seems to be that we, the democracies, are just as responsible for the rise of the dictators as the dictatorships themselves, and perhaps more so.
Harry Emerson Fosdick
#39. Falsehood is never better than truth, theft better than honesty, treachery better than loyalty, cowardice better than courage.
Harry Emerson Fosdick
#40. It is not marriage that fails; it is people that fail. All that marriage does is to show people up.
Harry Emerson Fosdick
#41. Nothing in human life, least of all in religion, is ever right until it is beautiful.
Harry Emerson Fosdick
#42. Every human life involves an unfathomable mystery, for man is the riddle of the universe, and the riddle of man in his endowment with personal capacities.
Harry Emerson Fosdick
#44. Life asks not merely what you can do; it asks how much can you endure and not be spoiled.
Harry Emerson Fosdick
#45. I would rather live in a world where my life is surrounded by mystery than live in a world so small that my mind could comprehend it.
Harry Emerson Fosdick
#48. The first question to be answered by any individual or any social group, facing a hazardous situation, is whether the crisis is to be met as a challenge to strength or as an occasion for despair.
Harry Emerson Fosdick
#50. All intelligent faith in God has behind it a background of humble agnosticism.
Harry Emerson Fosdick
#52. No virtue is more universally accepted as a test of good character than trustworthiness .
Harry Emerson Fosdick
#53. 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.
Harry Emerson Fosdick
#54. Whatever the situation and however disheartening it may be, it is a great hour when a man ceases adopting difficulties as an excuse for despondency and tackles himself as the real problem. No mood need be his master.
Harry Emerson Fosdick
#55. Peace is an awareness of reserves from beyond ourselves, so that our power is not so much in us as through us. Peace is the gift, not of volitional struggle, but of spiritual hospitality.
Harry Emerson Fosdick
#56. Life consists not simply in what heredity and environment do to us but in what we make out of what they do to us.
Harry Emerson Fosdick
#58. I hate war for its consequences, for the lies it lives on and propagates, for the undying hatreds it arouses.
Harry Emerson Fosdick
#59. He is a poor patriot whose patriotism does not enable him to understand how all men everywhere feel about their altars and their hearthstones, their flag and their fatherland.
Harry Emerson Fosdick
#60. He who knows no hardships will know no hardihood. He who faces no calamity will need no courage. Mysterious though it is, the characteristics in human nature which we love best grow in a soil with a strong mixture of troubles.
Harry Emerson Fosdick
#62. 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.
Harry Emerson Fosdick
#67. 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.
Harry Emerson Fosdick
#68. 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.
Harry Emerson Fosdick
#69. The finest quality of our characters do not come from trying but from the mysterious and yet most effective capacity to be inspired.
Harry Emerson Fosdick
#70. Fearr imprisons, faith liberates; fear paralyzes, faith empowers; fear disheartens, faith encourages; fear sickens, faith heals; fear makes useless, faith also makes serviceable az quotes.
Harry Emerson Fosdick
#71. Nothing else matters much ... not wealth, nor learning, nor even health ... without this gift: the spiritual capacity to keep zest in living. This is the creed of creeds, the final deposit and distillation of all important faiths: that you should be able to believe in life.
Harry Emerson Fosdick
#72. A supremely religious man or woman is one who believes deeply and consistently in the veracity of his highest experiences. He has his hours in the cellar ... but he believes in the truth of the hours he spends upstairs.
Harry Emerson Fosdick
#73. It is by acts (actions) and not by ideas (mere thoughts) that people [really] live.
Harry Emerson Fosdick
#74. We cannot all be great, but we can always attach ourselves to something that it great.
Harry Emerson Fosdick
#77. To keep the Golden Rule we must put ourselves in other people's places, but to do that consists in and depends upon picturing ourselves in their places.
Harry Emerson Fosdick
#79. One must have the adventurous daring to accept oneself as a bundle of possibilities and undertake the most interesting game in the world
making the most of one's best.
Harry Emerson Fosdick
#80. He who cannot rest, cannot work; he who cannot let go, cannot hold on; he who cannot find footing, cannot go forward.
Harry Emerson Fosdick
#81. The stars are not so strange as the mind that studies them, analyzes their light, and measures their distance.
Harry Emerson Fosdick
#82. God has put within our lives meanings and possibilities that quite outrun the limits of mortality.
Harry Emerson Fosdick
#84. 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.
Harry Emerson Fosdick
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