Top 80 Harry Emerson Fosdick Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “No life ever grows great until it is focused, dedicated, disciplined.”

— Harry Emerson Fosdick

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

— Harry Emerson Fosdick

3. “Don’t simply retire from something; have something to retire to.”

— Harry Emerson Fosdick

4. “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

5. “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

6. “The tragedy of war is that it uses man’s best to do man’s worst.”

— Harry Emerson Fosdick

7. “The man who says it can’t be done is generally interrupted by someone doing it.”

— Harry Emerson Fosdick

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

— Harry Emerson Fosdick

9. “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

10. “No virtue is more universally accepted as a test of good character than trustworthiness .”

— Harry Emerson Fosdick

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

— Harry Emerson Fosdick

12. “Bitterness imprisons life; love releases it.”

— Harry Emerson Fosdick

13. “Money is a miraculous thing. It is your personal energy reduced to a portable form and endowed with power you yourself do not possess. It can go where you cannot go; speak languages you cannot speak; lift burdens you cannot touch with your fingers; save lives with which you cannot deal directly.”

— Harry Emerson Fosdick

14. “In the foothills of the Himalayas, one hears the prayer: “Oh Lord, we know not what is good for us. You know what it is. For it we pray.””

— Harry Emerson Fosdick

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

— Harry Emerson Fosdick

16. “Opinions may be mistaken; love never is.”

— Harry Emerson Fosdick

17. “No character is ultimately tested until it has suffered.”

— Harry Emerson Fosdick

18. “Every failure can be considered as a tragedy or a chance to learn something. The latter is healthier.”

— Harry Emerson Fosdick

19. “No one can get inner peace by pouncing on it.”

— Harry Emerson Fosdick

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

— Harry Emerson Fosdick

21. “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

22. “Happiness is not mostly pleasure, it is mostly victory.”

— Harry Emerson Fosdick

23. “Hold a picture of yourself long and steadily enough in your mind’s eye and you will be drawn toward it. Picture yourself vividly as winning and that alone will contribute immeasurably to success. Great living starts with a picture, held in your imagination, of what you would like to do or be.”

— Harry Emerson Fosdick

24. “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

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

— Harry Emerson Fosdick

26. “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.”

— Harry Emerson Fosdick

27. “It is magnificent to grow old, if one keeps young.”

— Harry Emerson Fosdick

28. “Bitterness imprisons life; love releases it. Bitterness paralyzes life; love empowers it. Bitterness sours life; love sweetens it. Bitterness sickens life; love heals it. Bitterness blinds life; love anoints its eyes.”

— Harry Emerson Fosdick

29. “Preaching is personal counseling on a group basis.”

— Harry Emerson Fosdick

30. “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

31. “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.”

— Harry Emerson Fosdick

32. “He who chooses the beginning of the road chooses the place it leads to.”

— Harry Emerson Fosdick

33. “It is cynicism and fear that freeze life; it is faith that thaws it out, releases it, sets it free.”

— Harry Emerson Fosdick

34. “Religion is not a burden, not a weight, it is wings.”

— Harry Emerson Fosdick

35. “Always take a job that is too big for you.”

— Harry Emerson Fosdick

36. “Every great scientist becomes a great scientist because of the inner self-abnegation with which he stands before truth, saying: “Not my will, but thine, be done.” What, then, does a man mean by saying, Science displaces religion, when in this deep sense science itself springs from religion?”

— Harry Emerson Fosdick

37. “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

Featured in: Strong Quotes

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

— Harry Emerson Fosdick

39. “Every year the inventions of science weave more inextricably the web that binds man to man, group to group, nation to nation.”

— Harry Emerson Fosdick

40. “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.”

— Harry Emerson Fosdick

41. “Prayer opens our lives for God so his will can be done in and through us, because in true prayer we habitually put ourselves into the attitude of willingness to do whatever God wills.”

— Harry Emerson Fosdick

42. “No man need stay the way he is.”

— Harry Emerson Fosdick

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

— Harry Emerson Fosdick

44. “Picture yourself vividly as winning and that alone will contribute immeasurably to success. Great living starts with a picture, held in your imagination, of what you would like to do or be.”

— Harry Emerson Fosdick

45. “Peace is an awareness of reserves from beyond ourselves, so that our power is not so much in us as through us. Peace is the gift, not of volitional struggle, but of spiritual hospitality.”

— Harry Emerson Fosdick

46. “One never finds life worth living. One always has to make it work living.”

— Harry Emerson Fosdick

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

— Harry Emerson Fosdick

48. “What a testing of character adversity is.”

— Harry Emerson Fosdick

49. “Atheism is a theoretical formulation of the discouraged life...”

— Harry Emerson Fosdick

50. “Of all mad faiths maddest is the faith that we can get rid of faith.”

— Harry Emerson Fosdick