All intelligent faith in God has behind it a background of humble agnosticism.
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.
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.
Life consists not simply in what heredity and environment do to us, but in what we make out of what they do to us.
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.
He is a poor son whose sonship does not make him desire to serve all men’s mothers.
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.
Opinions may be mistaken; love never is.
No virtue is more universally accepted as a test of good character than trustworthiness .
Of all mad faiths maddest is the faith that we can get rid of faith.
One could almost phrase the motto of our modern civilization thus: Science is my shepherd; I shall not want.
Preaching is personal counseling on a group basis.
Every year the inventions of science weave more inextricably the web that binds man to man, group to group, nation to nation.
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?
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.
Prayer, in this more inclusive sense, is the settled craving of a man’s heart, good or bad, his inward love and determining desire.
Men are given to complaining of unanswered prayer, but the great disasters are due to answered prayers.
No steam or gas drives anything until it is confined. No life ever grows great until it is focused, dedicated, and disciplined.
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.
There are many prayers that God must not answer, but there are no good prayers which God cannot answer.
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.