13 quotes
And indeed, no man has found his religion until he has found that for which he must sell his goods and his life.
The Meaning of God in Human Experience (1912)
For maturity is marked by the preference to be defeated rather than have a subjective success.
The Meaning of God in Human Experience (1912)
There can be no valid worship except that in which man is involuntarily bent by the presence of the Most Real, beyond his will.
The Meaning of God in Human Experience (1912)
A merged religion and a negligible or subordinate religion are no religion.
The Meaning of God in Human Experience (1912)
For the skeptic finds that he also was in search of objective truth: and that the absolute truth of his statement is irrelevant to his quest. Whence his skepticism toward objective truth remains unanswered.
The Meaning of God in Human Experience (1912)
There is, then, in these matters some absolute finding in the seeking: salvation is, to seek salvation, for in seeking it one has already abandoned mortality and his sin.
The Meaning of God in Human Experience (1912)
Religion is bound up in the difference between the sense of ignorance and the sense of mystery: the former means, "I know not"; the latter means "I know not; but it is known."
The Meaning of God in Human Experience (1912)
Every social need, such as the need for friendship, must be a party to its own satisfaction: I cannot passively find my friend as a ready-made friend; a ready-made human being he may be, but his friendship for me I must help to create by my own active resolve.
The Meaning of God in Human Experience (1912)
However rich we may become in knowledge of the deeper causes of historical results, we forgo all understanding of history if we forget this inner continuity,—i.e., the conscious intentions of the participants in history-making and their consciously known successes.
The Meaning of God in Human Experience (1912)
A person who wills to have a good will, already has a good will—in its rudiments. There is solid satisfaction in knowing that the mere desire to get out of an old habit is a material advance upon the condition of submergence in that habit. The longest step toward cleanliness is made when one gains—nothing but dissatisfaction with dirt.
The Meaning of God in Human Experience (1912)
This merely formal conceiving of the facts of one's own wretchedness is at the same time a departure from them—placing them in the object. It is not idle, therefore, to observe reflexively that in that very Thought, one has separated himself from them, and is no longer that which empirically he still sees himself to be.
The Meaning of God in Human Experience (1912)
What our view of the effectiveness of religion in history does at once make evident as to its nature is—first, its necessary distinction; second, its necessary supremacy. These characters though external have been so essential to its fruitfulness, as to justify the statement that without them religion is not religion. A merged religion and a negligible or subordinate religion are no religion.
The Meaning of God in Human Experience (1912)
We are driven to confess that we actually care more for religion than we do for religious theories and ideas: and in merely making that distinction between religion and its doctrine-elements, have we not already relegated the latter to an external and subordinate position? Have we not asserted that "religion itself" has some other essence or constitution than mere idea or thought?
The Meaning of God in Human Experience (1912)