Harry Emerson Fosdick Life Quotations

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.

One never finds life worth living. One always has to make it work living.

Nothing in human life, least of all in religion, is ever right until it is beautiful.

Don't simply retire from something; have something to retire to.

God has put within our lives meanings and possibilities that quite outrun the limits of mortality.

Bitterness imprisons life; love releases it.

Life is like a library owned by the author. In it are a few books which he wrote himself, but most of them were written for him.

No life ever grows great until it is focused, dedicated, disciplined.

The Sea of Galilee and the Dead Sea are made of the same water. It flows down, clean and cool, from the heights of Herman and the roots of the cedars of Lebanon. the Sea of Galilee makes beauty of it, the Sea of Galilee has an outlet. It gets to give. It gathers in its riches that it may pour them out again to fertilize the Jordan plain. But the Dead Sea with the same water makes horror. For the Dead Sea has no outlet. It gets to keep.

No horse gets anywhere until he is harnessed. No stream or gas drives anything until it is confined. No Niagara is ever turned into light and power until it is tunneled. No life ever grows great until it is focused, dedicated, disciplined.

I would rather live in a world where my life is surrounded by mystery than live in a world so small that my mind could comprehend 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.