No character is ultimately tested until it has suffered.
– Harry Emerson Fosdick
Suffering
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.
– Harry Emerson Fosdick
Achievement
Fear imprisons, faith liberates; fear paralyzes, faith empowers; fear disheartens, faith encourages; fear sickens, faith heals; fear makes useless, faith makes serviceable.
– Harry Emerson Fosdick
Fear | Healing
Nothing in human life, least of all in religion, is ever right until it is beautiful.
– Harry Emerson Fosdick
Religion | Beauty
The steady discipline of intimate friendship with Jesus results in men becoming like Him.
– Harry Emerson Fosdick
Jesus | Holiness | Discipline
He who cannot rest, cannot work; he who cannot let go, cannot hold on; he who cannot find footing, cannot go forward.
– Harry Emerson Fosdick
Contentment | WorkRest
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.
– Harry Emerson Fosdick
Compassion
All altruism springs from putting yourself in the other person’s place.
– Harry Emerson Fosdick
Compassion
Consider how impossible nobility of character would be if our goodness were untried innocence instead of victorious virtue.
– Harry Emerson Fosdick
Character | Virtue | Victory
A person wrapped up in himself makes a small package.
– Harry Emerson Fosdick
Pride
Liberty is always dangerous, but it is the safest thing we have.
– Harry Emerson Fosdick
Life | Liberty
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
Patience | Self-pity
Christians are supposed not merely to endure change, nor even to profit by it, but to cause it.
– Harry Emerson Fosdick
Christians | Change | Endurance
He who chooses the beginning of the road chooses the place it leads to. It is the means that determines the end.
– Harry Emerson Fosdick
Temptation
It is not marriage that fails; it is people that fail. All that marriage does is to show them up.
– Harry Emerson Fosdick
Marriage
Bitterness imprisons life; love releases it.
– Harry Emerson Fosdick
Love | Bitterness
Hating people is like burning down your own house to get rid of a rat.
– Harry Emerson Fosdick
Hatred
The tragedy of war is that it uses man’s best to do man’s worst.
– Harry Emerson Fosdick
War
The real war is inward of which the outer action is but the echo and reverberation.
– Harry Emerson Fosdick
Conscience
God is not a cosmic bellboy for whom we can press a button to get things.
– Harry Emerson Fosdick
Prayer
It is by acts and not by ideas that people live.
– Harry Emerson Fosdick
Service
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.
– Harry Emerson Fosdick
Reasoning | Music
Whatever you laugh at in others, laughs at yourself.
– Harry Emerson Fosdick
Friendship | Laughter
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.
– Harry Emerson Fosdick
Life
I hate war… for the dictatorships it puts in the place of democracies, and for the starvation that stalks after it.
– Harry Emerson Fosdick
War
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.
– Harry Emerson Fosdick
Suffering
God has put within our lives meanings and possibilities that quite outrun the limits of mortality.
– Harry Emerson Fosdick
Eternity
Don’t simply retire from something; have something to retire to.
– Harry Emerson Fosdick
Laziness
Preaching is personal counseling on a group basis.
– Harry Emerson Fosdick
Preaching
Our power is not so much in us as through us.
– Harry Emerson Fosdick
Character | Power
Picture yourself vividly as winning, and that alone will contribute immeasurably to success.
– Harry Emerson Fosdick
Achievement
Democracy is based upon the conviction that there are extraordinary possibilities in ordinary people.
– Harry Emerson Fosdick
Government
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
Achievement
Religion is not a burden, not a weight, it is wings.
– Harry Emerson Fosdick
Religion
I hate war for its consequences, for the lies it lives on and propagates, for the undying hatreds it arouses.
– Harry Emerson Fosdick
War
We cannot all be great, but we can always attach ourselves to something that is great.
– Harry Emerson Fosdick
Perseverance
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.
– Harry Emerson Fosdick
Reasoning | Music
Life asks not merely what you can do; it asks how much can you endure and not be spoiled.
– Harry Emerson Fosdick
Adversity | Life | Endurance
No man need stay the way he is.
– Harry Emerson Fosdick
Life
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.
– Harry Emerson Fosdick
Perseverance | Discipline
No man is the whole of himself; his friends are the rest of him.
– Harry Emerson Fosdick
Friendship
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
Reasoning
Watch what people are cynical about, and one can often discover what they lack.
– Harry Emerson Fosdick
Examples