Top 80 Harry Emerson Fosdick Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Whatever you laugh at in others, laughs at yourself.”

— Harry Emerson Fosdick

52. “Our power is not so much in us as through us.”

— Harry Emerson Fosdick

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

— Harry Emerson Fosdick

54. “No one can get inner peace by pouncing on it. – Harry Emerson FosdickNo one can get inner peace by pouncing on it.”

— Harry Emerson Fosdick

55. “Life is like a library owned by the author. In it are a few books which he wrote himself, but most of them were written for him.”

— Harry Emerson Fosdick

56. “Friends are necessary to a happy life. When friendship deserts us, we are as helpless as a ship left by the tide high upon the shore. When friendship returns to us, it’s as though the tide came back, giving us buoyancy and freedom.”

— Harry Emerson Fosdick

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

— Harry Emerson Fosdick

58. “Nothing in this world is more inspiring than a soul up against crippling circumstances who carries it off with courage and faith and undefeated character-nothing! See Light From Many Lamps, edited by L. E. Watson, article by H. E. Fosdick, pp. 93-94 re: a serious cripple who succeeded.”

— Harry Emerson Fosdick

59. “A person wrapped up in himself makes a small package.”

— Harry Emerson Fosdick

60. “No one can be wrong with man and right with God.”

— Harry Emerson Fosdick

61. “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

62. “Prayer, in this more inclusive sense, is the settled craving of a man’s heart, good or bad, his inward love and determining desire.”

— Harry Emerson Fosdick

63. “Falsehood is never better than truth, theft better than honesty, treachery better than loyalty, cowardice better than courage.”

— Harry Emerson Fosdick

64. “It is not marriage that fails; it is people that fail. All that marriage does is to show people up.”

— Harry Emerson Fosdick

65. “He is a poor son whose sonship does not make him desire to serve all men’s mothers.”

— Harry Emerson Fosdick

66. “We cannot all be great, but we can always attach ourselves to something that is great.”

— Harry Emerson Fosdick

67. “Democracy is not simply a political system; it is a moral movement and it springs from adventurous faith in human possibilities.”

— Harry Emerson Fosdick

68. “Men are given to complaining of unanswered prayer, but the great disasters are due to answered prayers.”

— Harry Emerson Fosdick

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

— Harry Emerson Fosdick

70. “Once when Ole Bull, the great violinist, was giving a concert in Paris, his “A” string snapped and he transposed the composition and finished it on three strings. That is life- to have your “A” string snap and finish on three strings.”

— Harry Emerson Fosdick

71. “No steam or gas drives anything until it is confined. No life ever grows great until it is focused, dedicated, and disciplined.”

— Harry Emerson Fosdick

72. “The process has now run full circle: Preaching originates in personal counseling; preaching is personal counseling on a group basis; personal counseling originates in preaching. Personal counseling imparts to the preacher a practical familiarity with human nature which he would not otherwise obtain.”

— Harry Emerson Fosdick

73. “I renounce war for its consequences, for the lies it lives on and propagates, for the undying hatred it arouses, for the dictatorships it puts in place of democracy, for the starvation that stalks after it. I renounce war, and never again, directly or indirectly, will I sanction or support another.”

— Harry Emerson Fosdick

74. “Nothing in human life, least of all in religion, is ever right until it is beautiful.”

— Harry Emerson Fosdick

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

— Harry Emerson Fosdick

76. “The first question to be answered by any individual or any social group, facing a hazardous situation, is whether the crisis is to be met as a challenge to strength or as an occasion for despair.”

— Harry Emerson Fosdick

77. “One of the strange phenomena of the last century is the spectacle of religion dropping the appeal of fear while other human interests have picked it up.”

— Harry Emerson Fosdick

78. “All altruism springs from putting yourself in the other person’s place.”

— Harry Emerson Fosdick

79. “The all but unanimous judgment seems to be that we, the democracies, are just as responsible for the rise of the dictators as the dictatorships themselves, and perhaps more so.”

— Harry Emerson Fosdick

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

— Harry Emerson Fosdick

81. “The finest quality of our characters do not come from trying but from the mysterious and yet most effective capacity to be inspired.”

— Harry Emerson Fosdick

82. “Religion is something that only secondarily can be taught. It must must primarily be taught.”

— Harry Emerson Fosdick

83. “A good sermon is an engineering operation by which a chasm is bridged so that the spiritual goods on one side-the ‘unsearchable riches of Christ’ – are actually transported into personal lives upon the other.”

— Harry Emerson Fosdick

84. “There is one sense, however, in which answer to prayer can always be depended on, if a man has kept his life at all in harmony with God. Even when God cannot answer affirmatively the man’s petition he can answer the man.”

— Harry Emerson Fosdick

85. “There are many prayers that God must not answer, but there are no good prayers which God cannot answer.”

— Harry Emerson Fosdick