Harry Emerson Fosdick Quotes

Indeed, in view of its function, religion stands in greater need of a rational foundation of its ultimate principles than even the dogmas of science.

The minister and the priest teach that the organization is greater. No great philosophy has ever come from an organization, but from an individual whose research has been a personal study of God and ITS ways.

In requiring this candor and simplicity of mind in those who would investigate the truth of our religion, Christianity demands nothing more than is readily conceded to every branch of human science.

If you replace the word God in the Bible with the word Truth, it reads exactly right.

Each generation has to create the image of God that works for it.

The advent of a new religion, making serious and impressive claims to embody a new revelation from on high, is not a frequent occurrence.

Religion is not a popular error; it is a great instinctive truth, sensed by the people, expressed by the people.

There is a Mount Sinai for every child of God if he only knows where to find it.

I tell you in truth: all men are Prophets or else God does not exist.

Religion always remains higher than everyday life. In order to make the elevation towards religion easier for people, religion must be able to alter its forms in relation to the consciousness of modern man.

The scriptures were one of the ways God spoke to me - even when I was a child - about my needs, my situation, and my life. They still are. Since our needs change over a lifetime, God has different things to tell us at different times.

Religious belief, like history itself, is a story that is always unfolding, always subject to inquiry and ripe for questioning. For without doubt there is no faith.

We need to understand that Christianity is about changing; it is not about a religion.

Religion is not a conclusion of the reason.

The marvel of the Bhagavad-Gita is its truly beautiful revelation of life's wisdom which enables philosophy to blossom into religion.

Religion is not going to come up with any new arguments.

I think that the practice of religion allows one to discover emotional and psychological truth of a kind not available in the secular world.

Religious thinkers have done their best to twist science and philosophy to back up their law.

Let us realize the state we are in. Let us learn what needs to be learnt. Religion and God demand it.

It a heresy to deny that the stars are brought out by God from his treasure-house and hung in the sky every evening; any other view is false to the Catholic faith.

We cannot infer that because sciences of things divine and human are full of controversies and quarrels, therefore their whole subject-matter is uncertain ; for there have been many persons so enamoured of contradiction, as to turn into ridicule geometrical axioms.

Some things mankind can finish and be done with, but not ... science, that persists, and changes from ancient Chaldeans studying the stars to a new telescope with a 200-inch reflector and beyond; not religion, that persists, and changes from old credulities and world views to new thoughts of God and larger apprehensions of his meaning.

I always say that people should not rush to change religions. There is real value in finding the spiritual resources you need in your home religion.

I sometimes wish I had been educated a Catholic, in order to unite the poetry of religion with its higher principles. Are they necessarily inseparable? Is man really so much of a philosopher, that he can conceive of truth in its abstract purity, and divest life and the affections of all the aids of the imagination?

The best thing about science is that hard, empirical answers are always there if you look hard enough. The best thing about religion is that the very absence of that certainty is what requires - and gives rise to - deep feelings of faith.