Harry Emerson Fosdick Quotes

Our Creator would never have made such lovely days, and have given us the deep hearts to enjoy them, above and beyond all thought, unless we were meant to be immortal.

Every life is precious to God. God created every one of us. He gave us a soul, and that soul will live as long as God lives.

We were born to die and we die to live. As seedlings of God, we barely blossom on earth; we fully flower in heaven.

That's what religion teaches: that life is a temporary thing which is going to dissolve one day.

Surely God would not have created such a being as man, with an ability to grasp the infinite, to exist only for a day! No, no, man was made for immortality.

I don't know; I think I'd be gloomy without some faith that there is a purpose and there is a kind of witness to my life.

As told in Friendship with God, if we simply decided to believe and act as if first, we're all one, and second, life is eternal, it would render virtually everything we've done all our lives pointless.

There was one theory put forth by a journalist recently. I have a lot of friends that have died prematurely and a lot of friends that have died of natural causes. I've lost a lot of people over the years. This journalist basically recommended to me that God keeps me around because I amuse him.

Christianity is sustained by the knowledge that the object of man's life on earth is his development as an eternal being. Therefore, none of his expressions of life can be an end in itself, but must serve a higher purpose than the earthly life and happiness of the individual - or even than that of the race.

I would love to have faith. When you take God out of the universe, there is no-one taking care us - we are just parcels of meat, collections of atoms - we have a little flowering on Earth, and then we're gone.

I think the membrane - I say that the membrane between life and death is perilously thin. And I do think the story of Jesus, this great mythical story, can have transforming value in our lives.

Created in the awesome image of God, men and women know that life has a meaning beyond 'eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die.'

God comes first. Paradise is not cheap.

The purpose of God's creations and of His giving us life is to allow us to have the learning experience necessary for us to come back to Him, to live with Him in eternal life.

Why do people embrace God? In my opinion, belief in God and an afterlife is a necessary extension of man's need to feel that this life does not end with what we call death.

God loves us all, wants us all to share his kingdom, has a role for us all.

Most of us believe that we possess some aspect of eternity that will insure some kind of survival beyond death. The only problem with those strategies is they forget that only God is eternal. We are finite.

Life is the childhood of our immortality.

God's children and their happiness are my reasons for being.

Those who hope for no other life are dead even for this.

I'm trying to throw a big broad net to try to get people interested in God and believe that He's for them and has a purpose.

For those who seek to understand it, death is a highly creative force. The highest spiritual values of life can originate from the thought and study of death.

Life - a spiritual pickle preserving the body from decay.

It turns out that the God whose word will stand forever does not exist to insure our fantasies that we will not have to die as individuals or as a species. Such a God, moreover, does not invite us to presume we can comprehend God's creation.

Fear of death makes us devoid both of valour and religion. For want of valour is want of religious faith.