Zitate von Harry Emerson Fosdick

Informationen über Harry Emerson Fosdick

Geistlicher, Lehrer, Autor, "Martin Luther" (USA, 1878 - 1969).

Harry Emerson Fosdick · Geburtsdatum · Sterbedatum

Harry Emerson Fosdick wäre heute 145 Jahre, 10 Monate, 26 Tage oder 53.291 Tage alt.

Geboren am 24.05.1878 in Buffalo
Gestorben am 05.10.1969 in Bronxville
Sternzeichen: ♊ Zwillinge

• 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.

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• The very core of peace and love is imagination. All altruism springs from putting yourself in the other person's place.

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• 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.

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• 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. If we had the imagination to do that there would be fewer families estranged by misunderstanding between the older and the younger generations, fewer bitter judgments would pass our lips, fewer racial, national and class prejudices would stain our lives.

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• To say that we stand for personal liberty is not enough; personal liberty by itself alone can be selfish, individualistic, irresponsible, not believing in anything, not committed to anything, license without loyalty.

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• 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 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.

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• We moderns with all our pride in our boasted civilization are back where that ancient world was when it first confronted Christ. We are desperately in need of salvation. It is a humiliating experience for an individual or a whole generation to have to acknowledge that it needs to be saved, but only a blind man can fail to see that that is our situation now.

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• 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.

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• You can't build a triumphant soul on hunger. All the more reason, then, why we who are not hungry nor hopelessly overborne by circumstance should surmount life and carry off a victory in the face of it. And more than pluck is needed to do that, more than just a philosophy believed with the mind. An inner experience of power is needed far beyond ourselves.

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