Harry Emerson Fosdick Quotes

Hating people is like burning down your own house to get rid of a rat.

A person wrapped up in himself makes a small package.

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.

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."

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.

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.

No life ever grows great until it is focused, dedicated, disciplined.

No virtue is more universally accepted as a test of good character than trustworthiness .

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.

It is magnificent to grow old, if one keeps young.

Always take a job that is too big for you.

Picture yourself vividly as winning, and that alone will contribute immeasurably to success.

It is not marriage that fails; it is people that fail. All that marriage does is to show people up.

Hold a picture of yourself long and steadily enough in your mind's eye and you will be drawn toward it. Picture yourself vividly as winning and that alone will contribute immeasurably to success.

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.

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.

Bitterness imprisons life; love releases it.

Liberty is always dangerous, but it is the safest thing we have.

The steady discipline of intimate friendship with Jesus results in men becoming like Him.

Falsehood is never better than truth, theft better than honesty, treachery better than loyalty, cowardice better than courage.

[L]ife ceases to be a fraction and becomes an integer.

God is not a cosmic bellboy for whom we can press a button to get things.

No man need stay the way he is.

War's tragedy is that it uses man's best to do man's worst.

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.

Don't simply retire from something; have something to retire to.

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.

Democracy is based upon the conviction that there are extraordinary possibilities in ordinary people.

I hate war... for the dictatorships it puts in the place of democracies, and for the starvation that stalks after it.

I hate war for its consequences, for the lies it lives on and propagates, for the undying hatreds it arouses.

It is cynicism and fear that freeze life; it is faith that thaws it out, releases it, sets it free.

While each of us ... has depressed hours, none of us needs to be a depressed person.

No character is ultimately tested until it has suffered.

One could almost phrase the motto of our modern civilization thus: Science is my shepherd; I shall not want.

He is a poor son whose sonship does not make him desire to serve all men's mothers.

Life asks not merely what you can do; it asks how much can you endure and not be spoiled.

He who cannot rest, cannot work; he who cannot let go, cannot hold on; he who cannot find footing, cannot go forward.

Real Christians do not carry their religion, their religion carries them. It is not weight, it is wings.

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.

Christians are supposed not merely to endure change, nor even to profit by it, but to cause it.

No one can be wrong with man and right with God.

We cannot all be great, but we can always attach ourselves to something that is great.

No one can get inner peace by pouncing on it.

God has put within our lives meanings and possibilities that quite outrun the limits of mortality.

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.

Life consists not simply in what heredity and environment do to us, but in what we make out of what they do to us

All altruism springs from putting yourself in the other person's place.

Preaching is personal counseling on a group basis.

Nothing in human life, least of all in religion, is ever right until it is beautiful.

No man is the whole of himself; his friends are the rest of him.