Harry Emerson Fosdick (1878–1969) was an American liberal Protestant minister, teacher, and author. He was also an early practitioner of pastoral counseling and encouraged the church’s collaboration with the profession of psychiatry.
Born in Buffalo, New York, Fosdick graduated from the New York City’s Union Theological Seminary in 1903 and served at a Baptist church in Montclair, New Jersey. He quickly gained a reputation as an exponent of liberal Protestantism, both at the pulpit and in his printed articles. He attracted attention for his role in the 1920s’ fundamentalist-modernist controversy—the effort to relate the Christian society to the contemporaneous technological and urbanized culture.
From 1926 to 1946, Fosdick was a priest of the interdenominational Riverside Church, New York City. He wrote 40 volumes from an evangelical liberal viewpoint. His notable works include The Manhood of the Master (1913,) The Secret of Victorious Living (1934,) On Being a Real Person (1943,) A Faith for Tough Times (1952,) and The Living of These Days, an Autobiography (1956.)
Fosdick was perhaps the most widely known and respected preacher of his generation. He preached to a nationwide audience each week on the radio, and he influenced a generation of fledgling ministers as a professor of homiletics at Union Seminary.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Harry Emerson Fosdick
Hold a picture of yourself long and steadily enough in your mind’s eye and you will be drawn toward it. Picture yourself vividly as winning and that alone will contribute immeasurably to success. Great living starts with a picture, held in your imagination, of what you would like to do or be.
—Harry Emerson Fosdick
Topics: Imagination, Winning
One never finds life worth living. One always has to make it worth living.
—Harry Emerson Fosdick
We Americans say that the Constitution made the nation. Well, the Constitution is a great document and we never would have been a nation without it, but it took more than that to make the nation. Rather it was our forefathers and foremothers, who made the Constitution and then made it work. The government they constructed did get great things out of them, but it was not the government primarily that put the great things into them. What put the great things into them was their home life, their religion, their sense of personal responsibility to Almighty God, their devotion to education, their love of liberty, their personal character.
—Harry Emerson Fosdick
Topics: America
Christians are supposed not merely to endure change, nor even to profit by it, but to cause it.
—Harry Emerson Fosdick
Topics: Change
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. The stars are not so strange as the mind that studies them, analyzes their light, and measures their distance.
—Harry Emerson Fosdick
Topics: Life
God is not a cosmic bellboy for whom we can press a button to get things.
—Harry Emerson Fosdick
Topics: Prayer
Hating people is like burning down your own house to get rid of a rat.
—Harry Emerson Fosdick
Topics: Hate, Hatred
To keep the Golden Rule we must put ourselves in other people’s places, but to do that consists in and depends upon picturing ourselves in their places.
—Harry Emerson Fosdick
Topics: Neighbors
Life ceases to be a fraction and becomes an integer.
—Harry Emerson Fosdick
Topics: Self-Discovery
A supremely religious man or woman is one who believes deeply and consistently in the veracity of his highest experiences. He has his hours in the cellar … but he believes in the truth of the hours he spends upstairs.
—Harry Emerson Fosdick
Topics: Beliefs
Bitterness imprisons life; love releases it.
—Harry Emerson Fosdick
Topics: Forgiveness, Bitterness, Hatred
He is a poor son whose sonship does not make him desire to serve all men’s mothers.
—Harry Emerson Fosdick
Topics: Mothers
He who chooses the beginning of a road chooses the place it leads to. It is the means that determine the end.
—Harry Emerson Fosdick
No horse gets anywhere until he is harnessed. No steam or gas ever 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.
—Harry Emerson Fosdick
Topics: Action, Discipline, Focus, Concentration
No one can get inner peace by pouncing on it.
—Harry Emerson Fosdick
Topics: Relaxation, Stress
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.
—Harry Emerson Fosdick
Topics: Faith, Belief
No virtue is more universally accepted as a test of good character than trustworthiness.
—Harry Emerson Fosdick
At very best, a person wrapped up in himself makes a small package.
—Harry Emerson Fosdick
Topics: Humility, Conceit, Vanity, Service
All altruism springs from putting yourself in the other person’s place.
—Harry Emerson Fosdick
Topics: Giving, Kindness, Service
Our power is not so much in us as through us.
—Harry Emerson Fosdick
Topics: Power
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.
—Harry Emerson Fosdick
Topics: Dying, Death
Religion is not a burden, not a weight, it is wings
—Harry Emerson Fosdick
Topics: Religion
Liberty is always dangerous, but it is the safest thing we have.
—Harry Emerson Fosdick
Topics: Freedom, Danger, Risk, Liberty
Rebellion against your handicaps gets you nowhere. Self-pity gets you nowhere. One must have the adventurous daring to accept oneself as a bundle of possibilities and undertake the most interesting game in the world—making the most of one’s best.
—Harry Emerson Fosdick
Topics: Self-Knowledge, Awareness
Democracy is based upon the conviction that there are extraordinary possibilities in ordinary people.
—Harry Emerson Fosdick
Topics: Conviction, Democracy
The steady discipline of intimate friendship with Jesus results in men becoming like Him.
—Harry Emerson Fosdick
Topics: Christianity
Fear imprisons, faith liberates; fear paralyzes, faith empowers; fear disheartens, faith encourages; fear sickens, faith heals; fear makes useless, faith makes serviceable.
—Harry Emerson Fosdick
To find one’s work in the world and do it honorably, to keep one’s record clean so that nothing clandestine, furtive, surreptitious can ever leap out upon one from ambush and spoil one’s life, to be able, therefore, unafraid to look the world in the face, to live honorably also with one’s own soul because one keeps there no secret place like the bloody closet in Bluebeard’s palace where the dead things hang, to walk life’s journey unhaunted by the ghosts of people from whose ruin one has stolen pleasure, and so at last to be a gentleman, one, that is, who puts a little more into life than one takes out—gather up the significance of such character, forty years old, sixty years old, eighty years old—one may well celebrate the solid satisfactions of such a life.
—Harry Emerson Fosdick
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.
—Harry Emerson Fosdick
Topics: Difficulty, Adversity, Courage
We settle things by a majority vote, and the psychological effect of doing that is to create the impression that the majority is probably right. Of course, on any fine issue the majority is sure to be wrong. Think of taking a majority vote on the best music. Jazz would win over Chopin. Or on the best novel. Many cheap scribblers would win over Tolstoy. And any day a prizefight will get a bigger crowd, larger gate receipts and wider newspaper publicity than any new revelation of goodness, truth or beauty could hope to achieve in a century.
—Harry Emerson Fosdick
Topics: Government
There need not be in religion, or music, or art, or love, or goodness, anything that is against reason; but never while the sun shines will we get great religion, or music, or art, or love, or goodness, without going beyond reason.
—Harry Emerson Fosdick
Topics: Religion
Don’t simply retire from something; have something to retire to.
—Harry Emerson Fosdick
Topics: Retirement
It is cynicism and fear that freeze life; it is faith that thaws it out, releases it, sets it free.
—Harry Emerson Fosdick
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
George C. Lorimer American Baptist Clergyman
Jesse Jackson American Baptist Civil Rights Activist
Billy Graham American Baptist Religious Leader
Frederick Buechner American Presbyterian Clergyman
William Laurence Sullivan American Unitarian Clergyman
Martin Luther King, Jr. American Civil Rights Leader
Russell Conwell American Baptist Minister
George Boardman the Younger American Baptist Minister
Charles Spurgeon English Baptist Preacher
Thomas Merton American Trappist Monk