Harry Emerson Fosdick - Life Quotes

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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
Every human life involves an unfathomable mystery, for man is the riddle of the universe, and the riddle of man is his endowment with personal capacities. The stars are not so strange as the mind that studies them, analyzes their light, and measures their distances.

Harry Emerson Fosdick
Some Christians carry their religion on their backs. It is a packet of beliefs and practices which they must bear. At times it grows heavy and they would willingly lay it down, but that would mean a break with old traditions, so they shoulder it again. But real Christians do not carry their religion, their religion carries them. It is not weight, it is wings. It lifts them up, it sees them over hard places. It makes the universe seem friendly, life purposeful, hope real, sacrifice worthwhile. It sets them free from fear, futility, discouragement, and sin — the great enslaver of men's souls. You can know a real Christian when you see him, by his bouyancy.

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
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
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
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
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