43 Harry Emerson Fosdick Quotes

No character is ultimately tested until it has suffered.

The world is moving so fast these days that the one who says it can't be done is generally interrupted by someone doing it.

Fear imprisons, faith liberates; fear paralyzes, faith empowers; fear disheartens, faith encourages; fear sickens, faith heals; fear makes useless, faith makes serviceable.

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

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

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

Consider how impossible nobility of character would be if our goodness were untried innocence instead of victorious virtue.

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.

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

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

He who chooses the beginning of the road chooses the place it leads to. It is the means that determines the end.

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.

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

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.

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

Bitterness imprisons life; love releases it.

The tragedy of war is that it uses man's best to do man's worst.

The real war is inward of which the outer action is but the echo and reverberation.

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

It is by acts and not by ideas that people live.

There need not be in religion, or music, or art, or love, or goodness, anything that is against reason; but never while the sun shines will we get great religion, or music, or art, or love, or goodness, without going beyond reason.

Whatever you laugh at in others, laughs at yourself.

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.

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

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.

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

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

Preaching is personal counseling on a group basis.

Our power is not so much in us as through us.

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

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

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

Religion is not a burden, not a weight, it is wings.

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

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

We settle things by a majority vote, and the psychological effect of doing that is to create the impression that the majority is probably right. Of course, on any fine issue the majority is sure to be wrong. Think of taking a majority vote on the best music. Jazz would win over Chopin. Or on the best novel. Many cheap scribblers would win over Tolstoy. And any day a prizefight will get a bigger crowd, larger gate receipts and wider newspaper publicity than any new revelation of goodness, truth or beauty could hope to achieve in a century.

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

No man need stay the way he is.

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.

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

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.

Watch what people are cynical about, and one can often discover what they lack.