Beauty is a road to reality, to finding God, just as is our moral experience, and our understanding of right and wrong.

Christ’s Ideals for Living, Beauty

In the gospel of Christ both conviction and tolerance are necessary. For if there is tolerance without conviction the result is a sentimentality without direction or achievement. And if there is conviction without tolerance, the result is bigotry and tragedy without measure.

Christ’s Ideals for Living, Conviction

It is not an easy matter to determine when one should conform and when one should rebel. Both are extremes, and extremes are dangerous business. But there is a sure guide: It is the gospel of Christ, the gospel of love. Whenever we deviate from love, we part from Christ. When we become slaves to a blind conformity, we are not disciples of Christ, who was far from a conformist himself. And when we are iconoclasts—lacking in appreciation of the past, we miss the Savior’s example, for He himself possessed a knowledge of the Old Testament and quoted its profoundest truths throughout His ministry.

Christ’s Ideals for Living, Conviction

It was because [Jesus] loved all mankind that He became angered at the selfishness and luxury of Dives while Lazarus was starving. He wanted religion at its best and, therefore, became indignant against the Pharisees for their insincerity and self-righteousness. Jesus loved deeply, and for that reason, and in proportion to that love, do we find His courageous indignation and opposition to the evils of His day.

Christ’s Ideals for Living, Courage

High standards are never maintained without high courage to match them.

Christ’s Ideals for Living, Courage

Intellectual courage is undoubtedly the most difficult and, therefore, the rarest of human achievements. Few will seek a new intellectual position. Fewer will maintain it even if reached by honest effort because to do so will usually require the additional courage to reconstitute one’s old ideas in the light of new knowledge. But perhaps even more difficult for the individual to resist, in spite of great courage, is the pressure of social sanction—the disapproval of friends and neighbors and community.

Christ’s Ideals for Living, Courage

Courageous self-reliance is the capacity to do some thinking for yourself. It is the determined will to have a better reason for believing something than merely because someone has told you second-hand thoughts and second-hand experiences. Rather, it is thinking and living great truths so they are part of you. It is the courage to avoid sheep-mindedness at all cost, and make ideas your own so that they may have the ring of authority and conviction.

Christ’s Ideals for Living, Courage

It takes a lot of pluck to win a victory against odds. But it takes even more to sustain one disappointing failure after another over a prolonged period of time, and still keep faith and hope for the future. This is the test of life: not alone how much one can achieve, succeed, win—but how much one can endure of defeat, discouragement, outright failure—and still keep a fine spirit, come up smiling, and bear the losses with equanimity and poise and faith. This is the test of man.

Christ’s Ideals for Living, Endurance

Truly great friendships are based on moral and spiritual foundations—fair play, honesty, integrity, and loyalty to great causes.

Christ’s Ideals for Living, Friendship

The best gift one can give his friends is himself at his best.

Christ’s Ideals for Living, Friendship

This is the ideal of Christ; that those who are stronger help the weaker; that each boy and each girl be not handicapped by an unfortunate environment; that all are children of one Father in heaven who wants each to realize his fullest capabilities. So the state offers to each a free education, laws seek to prevent special privileges, and fair competition is held as a way to give everyone a chance to win a place in the sun.

Christ’s Ideals for Living, Justice

The test of true religion, as Christ portrays it again and again is genuine brother hood. An in magnanimity we have the severest test of brotherhood’s meaning: to bear injury without seeking vengeance, to be slandered without returning in kind, to be wronged and refuse to “get even.” Rather, to have a spirit so magnanimous that one strives to help the injurer, the vilifier, and the wrongdoer. This is what Christ mean when He said, “Love your enemies, do good to them which hate you.”

Christ’s Ideals for Living, Magnanimity

Life needs serenity and it needs adventure. Christ talks of inward peace, and also of a crusade; of rest to our souls, and a task to be achieved; of hearing and doing; of receiving and building; of the lowly in heart and those who “ask?seek?and knock.”

Christ’s Ideals for Living, Serenity

To put the kingdom of God and His righteousness first, does not mean one neglects health, and business, and relaxation, and home. Rather, all of these important phases of life are made better by being subject to the kingdom of God. Indeed the kingdom of God on earth is made up in part of a wonderful family life, a business where men make manhood as well as money, recreation where the spirit is renewed in fine fellowship, health so one can serve, and worship where the soul is restored through “the peace of God, which passeth all understanding.”

Christ’s Ideals for Living, Serenity

We need something to live for, as well as just to live—some cause bigger than ourselves to which we give ourselves, some purpose that fills our minds, and our physical hunger loses its pangs.

Christ’s Ideals for Living, Serenity

In the spiritual life described by Jesus, the unhurried atmosphere of flowers and birds was used to illustrate an unworried life for his disciples—to live day by day.

Christ’s Ideals for Living, Serenity

There comes a time in every man’s life when to some degree he must “lay down the flag of revolt and learn a large, serene, and wise resignation.” Not only must the universe be accepted, but we have the more difficult task of accepting ourselves. There is an inevitability about the laws of our world, and there is considerable inevitability about ourselves. Sometimes wisdom leaves no alternative: we must adjust our first-rate ambitions down to our second-rate abilities, despite the exhortation that “he can who thinks he can.”

Christ’s Ideals for Living, Serenity

No university can change human nature or answer our questions about ultimate meaning, purpose, or destiny of human life.

One Man’s Search

Progress depends on establishing truth and eliminating myth.

One Man’s Search, p. 101

Life would be impoverished indeed without the myths of the arts and literature. People cannot live by truth alone; we need relaxation and play. Man lives by his imagination as well as by truth. He also lives better when his myths effectively motivate his moral life, such as in the timeless parables, the purgation afforded by tragedy, or the vision of perfection.

One Man’s Search, p. 103

Science explains the world, but myth sometimes enables man to endure the world.

One Man’s Search, p. 104

Ideals are best when loved for their own sake. Whatever the explanation of Plato’s ideas or ideals, they do shine with their own light, and they are noblest when stated in the clearest possible language. But then myths are invented to express these ideals, and before long the myths replace them. Eventually, these myths masquerade as ideals; and as such they are given wide acceptance by the credulous. Nevertheless, myths thus masquerading as ideals generally downgrade those ideals.

One Man’s Search, p. 107

There is no place for truth-claiming myths in a society sufficiently advanced to conceive and support free universities. A culture of greatness, whether it be in politics, religion, or economics, should constantly weed out truth-claiming myths. It is better to face life as it is, thereby seeking for ways to improve it, than to use the escape of believing what is an untrue, unreal, or fictional interpretation of life.

One Man’s Search, p. 109

There is one observation to be made about fringe religion. When it is stressed for its own sake, when doctrines, sacraments, and organizations are considered as ends rather than as means, the result is a poverty religion.

One Man’s Search, p. 146

Now science is religion’s competitor in giving man what he wants. The great issue between science and religion is not intellectual, sharp though that issue has been; it is that men are giving up religion in favor of science because of what science can do for them.

One Man’s Search, p. 149

[W]hile the ideas about God may appear to change, the experience of God appears to abide with men in all ages.

One Man’s Search, p. 150

It is a strange thing that an experience so decisive as to influence a person’s total life and commitment should yet be described as ineffable, unutterable, indescribable, and unexpressible.

One Man’s Search, p. 151

Religious experience means that, for the individual, God is not a matter of belief or opinion, but is a genuine, experienced fact, an inescapable reality.

One Man’s Search, p. 151

The argument from religious experience is that just as friendship is not a matter of proof but rather of experience, so too is beauty a matter of experience, also love and goodness, and so also is the experience of God.

One Man’s Search, p. 151

He [the religious liberal] believes that freedom involves inevitable disagreements, and that such disagreements can indicate a healthy situation.

One Man’s Search, p. 173

A liberal believes in man.

One Man’s Search, p. 173

[T]here is possibly one common denominator of all religious liberals. It is their faith in human reason. The liberal will not surrender his reason to claims of faith. He may go beyond his reason to a strong religious faith, but he does not willingly go against his reason for the sake of religious faith.

One Man’s Search, p. 175

Orthodoxy has fought the liberal for what he is—one who would challenge a religious belief if he thought the truth were at stake. Such liberals are dangerous to organized religion. With the aid of our tragic times, the orthodox have had a field day against the liberals. Crisis theology has replaced natural theology. The Bible has become immune from criticicism. Authority is preferred to free inquiry.

One Man’s Search, p. 175

[N]othing ever will be healthy about the religion of America until the liberal returns. Religion divorced from reason takes the risk of becoming just plain nonsense. Religion divorced from faith in man takes the risk of giving comfort while man blows himself to hell or heaven. And religion divorced from facing man’s social problems takes the risk of deserting man, at least in this twentieth century, which is perhaps his greatest hour of need.

One Man’s Search, p. 176

How do men stay free? How is freedom maintained? There is only one answer: by education.

One Man’s Search, p. 77

When is freedom lost? When power is centralized.

One Man’s Search, p. 77

Freedom is maintained by knowledge and understanding. It is lost through ignorance and irrational prejudices.

One Man’s Search, p. 80

If businessmen lose their fight for economic freedom, our intellectual freedoms will soon fall before a powerful state.

One Man’s Search, p. 77-7

Our goals for financial well-being must be pursued in a context that involves our fellow human beings. Making money and increasing our assets in ways that deprive them of money or decrease their own resources is counter to gospel ideals. We may not use other people simply as a means to our own selfish ends. A good business transaction should benefit both parties to an agreement— the buyer and seller, the builder and homeowner, doctor and patient, teacher and student.

Do Justly and Love Mercy, p. 42-4

If I act out of the conviction that what I am doing is right and worthwhile, no one can rob me of the satisfaction of living.

How Can I Help?, p. 22