Felix Adler's Quotes

The Ethical Society, therefore, is like a Church in maintaining, and emphasizing the importance of maintaining the custom of public assemblies on Sunday.

You do not build your own houses, nor make your own garments, nor bake your own bread, simply because you know that if you were to attempt all these things they would all be more or less ill done.

The past speaks to us in a thousand voices, warning and comforting, animating and stirring to action.

The family is the school of duties - founded on love.

Few are there that will leave the secure seclusion of the scholar's life, the peaceful walks of literature and learning, to stand out a target for the criticism of unkind and hostile minds.

The hero is one who kindles a great light in the world, who sets up blazing torches in the dark streets of life for men to see by.

The platform of an Ethical Society is itself the altar; the address must be the fire that burns thereon.

We measure our enjoyments by the sum expended.

An anxious unrest, a fierce craving desire for gain has taken possession of the commercial world, and in instances no longer rare the most precious and permanent goods of human life have been madly sacrificed in the interests of momentary enrichment.

Ethical religion can be real only to those who are engaged in ceaseless efforts at moral improvement. By moving upward we acquire faith in an upward movement, without limit.

If you desire information on some point of law, you are not likely to ponder over the ponderous tomes of legal writers in order to obtain the knowledge you seek, by your own unaided efforts.

In a country of such recent civilization as ours, whose almost limitless treasures of material wealth invite the risks of capital and the industry of labor, it is but natural that material interests should absorb the attention of the people to a degree elsewhere unknown.

The freedom of thought is a sacred right of every individual man, and diversity will continue to increase with the progress, refinement, and differentiation of the human intellect.

Every dogma, every philosophic or theological creed, was at its inception a statement in terms of the intellect of a certain inner experience.

For more than three thousand years men have quarreled concerning the formulas of their faith.

Love is the expansion of two natures in such fashion that each include the other, each is enriched by the other.

Love of country is like love of woman - he loves her best who seeks to bestow on her the highest good.

No one can fail to see that the power of the Church among large numbers in many communities is today diminishing, or has already ceased.

No religion can long continue to maintain its purity when the church becomes the subservient vassal of the state.

Simplicity should not be identified with bareness.

The ethical manifold, conceived of as unified, furnishes, or rather is, the ideal of the whole.

The exercises of our meeting are to be simple and devoid of all ceremonial and formalism.

The office of the public teacher is an unenviable and thankless one.