A person wrapped up in himself makes a small package.
Harry Emerson Fosdick

Bitterness imprisons life; love releases it.
Harry Emerson Fosdick

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

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

Don't simply retire from something; have something to retire to.
Harry Emerson Fosdick

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It is by acts and not by ideas that people live.
Harry Emerson Fosdick

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

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

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