Top 120 Reinhold Niebuhr Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.”

— Reinhold Niebuhr

Featured in: Change Quotes

2. “Forgiveness is the final form of love.”

— Reinhold Niebuhr

Featured in: Love Quotes, Philosophical Quotes, Forgiveness Quotes

3. “Aim for the stars and maybe you’ll reach the sky.”

— Reinhold Niebuhr

Featured in: Government Quotes, Sky Quotes

4. “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference. Living one day at a time; enjoying one moment at a time; accepting hardships as the pathway to peace; taking, as He did, this sinful world as it is, not as I would have it; trusting that He will make all things right if I surrender to His Will; that I may be reasonably happy in this life and supremely happy with Him forever in the next. Amen.”

— Reinhold Niebuhr

5. “Love is the motive, but justice is the instrument.”

— Reinhold Niebuhr

6. “Change what cannot be accepted and accept what cannot be changed.”

— Reinhold Niebuhr

7. “A genuine faith resolves the mystery of life by the mystery of God.”

— Reinhold Niebuhr

8. “Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in a lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope.”

— Reinhold Niebuhr

9. “Humor is a prelude to faith and laughter is the beginning of prayer.”

— Reinhold Niebuhr

10. “God, give us the grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed.”

— Reinhold Niebuhr

11. “God, give us grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed, Courage to change the things which should be changed, and the Wisdom to distinguish the one from the other.”

— Reinhold Niebuhr

12. “Man is his own most vexing problem.”

— Reinhold Niebuhr

13. “Man’s capacity for justice makes democracy possible, but man’s inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.”

— Reinhold Niebuhr

14. “Cheese, wine, and a friend must be old to be good.”

— Reinhold Niebuhr

15. “Ultimately evil is done not so much by evil people, but by good people who do not know themselves and who do not probe deeply.”

— Reinhold Niebuhr

16. “The final wisdom of life requires not the annulment of incongruity but the achievement of serenity within and above it.”

— Reinhold Niebuhr

17. “Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore, we are saved by love. No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as from our own; therefore, we are saved by the final form of love, which is forgiveness.”

— Reinhold Niebuhr

18. “One of the fundamental points about religious humility is you say you don’t know about the ultimate judgment. It’s beyond your judgment. And if you equate God’s judgment with your judgment, you have a wrong religion.”

— Reinhold Niebuhr

19. “Life has no meaning except in terms of responsibility.”

— Reinhold Niebuhr

20. “Toleration of people who differ in convictions and habits requires a residual awareness of the complexity of truth and the possibility of opposing view having some light on one or the other facet of a many-sided truth.”

— Reinhold Niebuhr

21. “The chief source of man’s inhumanity to man seems to be the tribal limits of his sense of obligation to other men.”

— Reinhold Niebuhr

22. “Frantic orthodoxy is never rooted in faith but in doubt. It is when we are unsure that we are doubly sure.”

— Reinhold Niebuhr

23. “Life is a battle between faith and reason in which each feeds upon the other, drawing sustenance from it and destroying it.”

— Reinhold Niebuhr

24. “Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by faith.”

— Reinhold Niebuhr

25. “All men who live with any degree of serenity live by some assurance of grace.”

— Reinhold Niebuhr

26. “Nationalism: One of the effective ways in which the modern man escapes life’s ethical problems.”

— Reinhold Niebuhr

27. “Human beings are endowed by nature with both selfish and unselfish impulses.”

— Reinhold Niebuhr

28. “The sad duty of politics is to establish justice in a sinful world.”

— Reinhold Niebuhr

29. “Original sin is that thing about man which makes him capable of conceiving of his own perfection and incapable of achieving it.”

— Reinhold Niebuhr

30. “One of the most pathetic aspects of human history is that every civilization expresses itself most pretentiously, compounds its partial and universal values most convincingly, and claims immortality for its finite existence at the very moment when the decay which leads to death has already begun.”

— Reinhold Niebuhr

31. “All human sin seems so much worse in its consequences than in its intentions.”

— Reinhold Niebuhr

32. “Goodness, armed with power, is corrupted; and pure love without power is destroyed.”

— Reinhold Niebuhr

33. “There is no social evil, no form of injustice whether of the feudal or the capitalist order which has not been sanctified in some way or other by religious sentiment and thereby rendered more impervious to change.”

— Reinhold Niebuhr

34. “Great talents have some admirers, but few friends.”

— Reinhold Niebuhr

35. “The society in which each man lives is at once the basis for, and the nemesis of, that fulness of life which each man seeks.”

— Reinhold Niebuhr

36. “The fence and the boundary line are the symbols of the spirit of justice. They set the limits upon each man’s interest to prevent one from taking advantage of the other.”

— Reinhold Niebuhr

37. “Marxism is the modern form of Jewish prophecy.”

— Reinhold Niebuhr

38. “The cross symbolizes a cosmic as well as historic truth. Love conquers the world, but its victory is not an easy one.”

— Reinhold Niebuhr

39. “All known existence points beyond itself.”

— Reinhold Niebuhr

40. “Man is endowed by nature with organic relations to his fellow men; and natural impulse prompts him to consider the needs of others even when they compete with his own.”

— Reinhold Niebuhr

41. “This insinuation of the interests of the self into even the most ideal enterprises and most universal objectives, envisaged in moments of highest rationality, makes hypocrisy an inevitable by product of all virtuous endeavor.”

— Reinhold Niebuhr

42. “If we can find God only as he is revealed in nature we have no moral God.”

— Reinhold Niebuhr

43. “Democracy is finding proximate solutions to insoluble problems.”

— Reinhold Niebuhr

44. “The will-to-live becomes the will-to-power.”

— Reinhold Niebuhr

45. “Reason is not the sole basis of moral virtue in man. His social impulses are more deeply rooted than his rational life.”

— Reinhold Niebuhr

Featured in: Virtue Quotes

46. “The history of mankind is a perennial tragedy; for the highest ideals which the individual may project are ideals which he can never realize in social and collective terms.”

— Reinhold Niebuhr

47. “Rationality belongs to the cool observer, but because of the stupidity of the average man, he follows not reason, but faith, and the naive faith requires necessary illusion and emotionally potent oversimplifications which are provided by the myth-maker to keep ordinary person on course.”

— Reinhold Niebuhr

48. “There was a time when I had all the answers. My real growth began when I discovered that the questions to which I had the answers were not the important questions.”

— Reinhold Niebuhr

49. “The pretensions of final truth are always partlyan effort to obscure a darkly felt consciousness of the limits of human knowledge.”

— Reinhold Niebuhr

50. “The prophet himself stands under the judgment which he preaches. If he does not know that, he is a false prophet.”

— Reinhold Niebuhr