Harry Emerson Fosdick
Harry Emerson Fosdick
Harry Emerson Fosdickwas an American pastor. Fosdick became a central figure in the "Fundamentalist-Modernist Controversy" within American Protestantism in the 1920s and 1930s and was one of the most prominent liberal ministers of the early 20th Century. Although a Baptist, he was called to serve as pastor, in New York City, at First Presbyterian Church in Manhattan's West Village, and then at the historic, inter-denominational Riverside Church in Morningside Heights, Manhattan...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionClergyman
Date of Birth24 May 1878
CountryUnited States of America
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?
No one can get inner peace by pouncing on it, by vigorously willing to have it ... Peace is a consciousness of springs too deep for earthly droughts to dry up. Peace is the gift not of volitional struggle but of spiritual hospitality.
Democracy is not simply a political system; it is a moral movement and it springs from adventurous faith in human possibilities.
All altruism springs from putting yourself in the other person's place.
He who chooses the beginning of the road chooses the place it leads to. It is the means that determines the end.
We cannot all be great, but we can always attach ourselves to something that it great.
The world is moving so fast these days that the one who says it can't be done is generally interrupted by someone doing it.
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 chooses the beginning of the road chooses the place it leads to.
Liberty is always dangerous, but it is the safest thing we have.
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.
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.
It is going to be a long, hard haul; it will require patience, courage, faith that hangs on when hope fails, if we are to tame the rude barbarity of man, so that the atomic age becomes a blessing, not a curse. There never was such a day for the Christian gospel. God help us all in these years ahead to make that gospel live in men and nations!
The most extraordinary thing about the oyster is this. Irritations set into his shell. He does not like them. But when he cannot get ride of them, he uses the irritation to do the loveliest thing an oyster ever has a chance to do. If there are irritations in our lives today, there is only one prescription: make a pearl. It may have to be a pearl of patience, but anyhow, make a pearl. And it takes faith and I love to do it.