Money is a miraculous thing. It is your personal energy reduced to a portable form and endowed with power you yourself do not possess. It can go where you cannot go; speak languages you cannot speak; lift burdens you cannot touch with your fingers; save lives with which you cannot deal directly.
Interpretation
Money is a powerful tool that transforms personal energy into a portable resource with capabilities beyond individual reach.
This quote by Harry Emerson Fosdick suggests that money serves as a conversion of one's personal energy and efforts into a medium that extends its influence and utility across various situations. It highlights how money can operate independently of the individual, achieving tasks and resolving issues that one might not personally be able to handle, thereby emphasizing its miraculous nature in facilitating interactions and providing aid in diverse circumstances.
In practice
In a business meeting discussing resource allocation, one might say, 'As Harry Emerson Fosdick noted, money is a miraculous thing that allows us to leverage our efforts beyond our immediate capabilities.'
Nothing else matters much...not wealth, nor learning, nor even health...without this gift: the spiritual capacity to keep zest in living. This is the creed of creeds, the final deposit and distillation of all important faiths: that you should be able to believe in life.
No one can get inner peace by pouncing on it, by vigorously willing to have it ... Peace is a consciousness of springs too deep for earthly droughts to dry up. Peace is the gift not of volitional struggle but of spiritual hospitality.
I renounce war for its consequences, for the lies it lives on and propagates, for the undying hatred it arouses, for the dictatorships it puts in place of democracy, for the starvation that stalks after it. I renounce war, and never again, directly or indirectly, will I sanction or support another.
He who cannot rest, cannot work; he who cannot let go, cannot hold on; he who cannot find footing, cannot go forward.
No horse gets anywhere until he is harnessed. No stream or gas 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.
Nothing in this world is more inspiring than a soul up against crippling circumstances who carries it off with courage and faith and undefeated character-nothing! See Light From Many Lamps, edited by L. E. Watson, article by H. E. Fosdick, pp. 93-94 re: a serious cripple who succeeded.
At the back of my mind I had a sense of us sitting about waiting for some terrible event, and then I would remember that it had already happened.
What is faith? If you believe something because you have evidence for it, or rational argument, that is not faith. So faith seems to be believing something despite the absence of evidence or rational argument for it.
We must admit with humility that, while number is purely a product of our minds, space has a reality outside our minds, so that we cannot completely prescribe its properties a priori.
If you give up your freedom for safety, you don't deserve either one
Whenever we seek to avoid the responsibility for our own behavior, we do so by attempting to give that responsibility to some other individual or organization or entity. But this means we then give away our power to that entity.
I do have a sense of displacement as constant instability — the uninterrupted existence of everything that I love and care about is not guaranteed at all. I wait for catastrophes.
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