Harry Emerson Fosdick Quotes

49 Sourced Quotes

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

Harry Emerson Fosdick
God of grace and God of glory,
On Thy people pour Thy power.
Crown Thine ancient church's story,
Bring her bud to glorious flower.
Grant us wisdom, grant us courage,
For the facing of this hour,
For the facing of this hour.

Harry Emerson Fosdick
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
No horse gets anywhere until he is harnessed. No steam 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
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 defeated and that alone will make victory impossible. Picture yourself vividly as winning, and that alone will contribute immeasurably to success. Do not picture yourself as anything and you will drift like a derelict.

Harry Emerson Fosdick
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
A person completely wrapped up in himself makes a small package.

Harry Emerson Fosdick
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.

Harry Emerson Fosdick
The Church offers comradeship with Jesus in all the affairs of life. It gives men a clearer understanding of the mind of Christ. It is through Christ that they come to know God. The steady discipline of intimate friendship with Jesus results in men becoming like Him.

Harry Emerson Fosdick
Lo! the hosts of evil 'round us,
Scorn Thy Christ, assail His ways.
From the fears that long have bound us,
Free our hearts to faith and praise.
Grant us wisdom, grant us courage,
For the living of these days,
For the living of these days.

Harry Emerson Fosdick
Life is like a library owned by an author. In it are a few books which he wrote himself, but most of them were written for him.

Harry Emerson Fosdick
He who chooses the beginning of a road chooses the place it leads to. It is the means that determine the end.

Harry Emerson Fosdick
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!

Harry Emerson Fosdick
Don't simply retire from something; have something to retire to.

Harry Emerson Fosdick
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. Here lies the difference between a sermon and a lecture.

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

Harry Emerson Fosdick
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
What modern science is doing for multitudes of people, as anybody who watches American life can see, is not to disprove God's theoretical existence, but to make him "progressively less essential."

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

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

Harry Emerson Fosdick
Democracy is not simply a political system; it is a moral movement and it springs from adventurous faith in human possibilities.

Harry Emerson Fosdick
All intelligent faith in God has behind it a background of humble agnosticism.

Harry Emerson Fosdick
Rebellion against your handicaps gets you nowhere. Self-pity gets you nowhere. 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
The Sea of Galilee and the Dead Sea are made of the same water. It flows down, clean and cool, from the heights of Herman and the roots of the cedars of Lebanon. the Sea of Galilee makes beauty of it, the Sea of Galilee has an outlet. It gets to give. It gathers in its riches that it may pour them out again to fertilize the Jordan plain. But the Dead Sea with the same water makes horror. For the Dead Sea has no outlet. It gets to keep.

Harry Emerson Fosdick
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.

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

Harry Emerson Fosdick
Already all of us must have heard about the people who call themselves the Fundamentalists. Their apparent intention is to drive out of the evangelical churches men and women of liberal opinions. I speak of them the more freely because there are no two denominations more affected by them than the Baptist and the Presbyterian. We should not identify the Fundamentalists with the conservatives. All Fundamentalists are conservatives, but not all conservatives are Fundamentalists. The best conservatives can often give lessons to the liberals in true liberality of spirit, but the Fundamentalist program is essentially illiberal and intolerant.

Harry Emerson Fosdick