So our self-feeling in this world depends entirely on what we back ourselves to be and do.
Faith is synonymous with working hypothesis.
We have nothing to do but to receive, resting absolutely upon the merit, power, and love of our Redeemer.
Mankind’s common instinct for reality has always held the world to be essentially a theatre for heroism.
Intelligence is a fixed goal with variable means of achieving it.
The God of many men is little more than their court of appeal against the damnatory judgment passed on their failures by the opinion of the world.
Habit is the great flywheel of society.
The ultimate test of what a truth means is the conduct it dictates or inspires.
Real servants don’t try to use God for their purposes. They let God use them for His purposes.
We are not only gregarious animals, liking to be in sight of our fellows, but we have an innate propensity to get ourselves noticed, and noticed favorably, by our kind.
Need and struggle are what excite and inspire us; our hour of triumph is what brings the void. Not the Jews of the captivity, but those of the days of Solomon ’s glory are those from whom the pessimistic utterances in our Bible come.
Man’s chief difference from the brutes lies in the exuberant excess of his subjective propensities. Prune his extravagance, sober him, and you undo him.
As long as there are postmen, life will have zest.
On pragmatistic principles, if the hypothesis of God works satisfactorily in the widest sense of the word, it is true.
The absolute things, the last things, the overlapping things, are the truly philosophic concerns; all superior minds feel seriously about them, and the mind with the shortest views is simply the mind of the more shallow man.
When you have broken the reality into concepts you never can reconstruct it in its wholeness.
Any object not interesting in itself may become interesting through becoming associated with an object in which an interest already exists.
Materialism means simply the denial that the moral order is eternal, and the cutting off of ultimate hopes; spiritualism means theaffirmation of an eternal moral order and the letting loose of hope.
The old question of whether there is design is idle. The real question is what is the world, whether or not it have a designer – and that can be revealed only by the study of all nature’s particulars.
Since belief is measured by action, he who forbids us to believe religion to be true, necessarily also forbids us to act as we should if we did believe it to be true.