Harry Emerson Fosdick

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.

Harry Emerson Fosdick

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

Harry Emerson Fosdick

God is not a cosmic bellboy for whom we can press a button to get things done.

Harry Emerson Fosdick

Happiness is not mostly pleasure, it is mostly victory.

Harry Emerson Fosdick

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.

Harry Emerson Fosdick

He is a poor son whose sonship does not make him desire to serve all men’s mothers.

Harry Emerson Fosdick

It is by acts and not by ideas that people live.

Harry Emerson Fosdick

It is not marriage that fails; it is people that fail. All that marriage does is to show people up.

Harry Emerson Fosdick

Life consists not simply in what heredity and environment do to us but in what we make out of what they do to us.

Harry Emerson Fosdick

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.

Harry Emerson Fosdick