Quotes By Harry Emerson Fosdick

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

Whatever you laugh at in others, laughs at yourself.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Preaching is personal counseling on a group basis.

Bitterness imprisons life; love releases it.

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

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

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

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

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