Harry Emerson Fosdick Quotes - Page 3

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

The first question to be answered by any individual or by any social group, The real handle facing a hazardous sit - to a difficult uation, is whether the stuaton crisis is to be met as a challenge to strength or as an occasion for despair.

Granted the endless variations of moral customs, still the essential standards persist. As in a scientific laboratory, all else may change but the standards are unalterable- disinterested love of truth, fidelity to facts, accuracy in measurement, exactness of verification-so, in life as a whole, the towering ethical criteria remain unshaken. Falsehood is never better than truth, theft better than than honesty, treachery better than loyalty, cowardice better than courage.

No one can get inner peace by pouncing on it.

Opinions may be mistaken; love never is.

Preaching is personal counseling on a group basis.

Atheism is a theoretical formulation of the discouraged life.

Great living starts with a picture, held in your imagination, of what you would like to do or be.

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

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

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.

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

We ask the leaf, "Are you complete in yourself?" And the leaf answers, "No, my life is in the branches." We ask the branch, and the branch answers, "No my life is in the root." We ask the root, and it answers, "No my life is in the trunk and the branches and the leaves. Keep the branches stripped of leaves, and I shall die," So it is with the great tree of being. Nothing is completely and merely individual.

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

We cannot restore integrity and morality to our society until each of us-singly and individually-takes responsibility for our actions.

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.

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.

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

It is by acts (actions) and not by ideas (mere thoughts) that people [really] live.

The tragic evils of our life are so commonly unintentional. We did not start out for that poor, cheap goal. That aim was not in our minds at all....Look to the road you are walking on. 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The stars are not so strange as the mind that studies them, analyzes their light, and measures their distance.