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.
Our power is not so much in us as through us.
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.
Life asks not merely what you can do; it asks how much can you endure and not be spoiled.
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.
We cannot all be great, but we can always attach ourselves to something that is great.
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.