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Felix Adler Quotes
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For others named Felix Adler, see the Felix Adler navigation pageFelix Adler was a German American professor of political and social ethics, rationalist, influential lecturer on euthanasia, religious leader and social reformer who founded the Ethical Culture movement.

✵ 13. August 1851 – 24. April 1933
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Felix Adler: 99 quotes2 likes

Felix Adler Quotes

“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.”

Felix Adler

Section 2 : Religion
Founding Address (1876), Life and Destiny (1913)

“Where the roots of private virtue are diseased, the fruit of public probity cannot but be corrupt.”

Felix Adler

Founding Address (1876)

“Gladness, in some instances, springs from a natural buoyancy of temperament, and is quite consistent with shallowness and superficiality of character. In other cases it is coincident with the swift flow of the currents of the blood, and ceases when the stream flows more slowly and begins to stagnate. Or it is due to gifts which an exceptional good fortune showers into the laps of favoured mortals. Gladness of this sort comes with happiness and departs with it.
But the purified gladness of which I speak is not dependent on these accidents. It is the mark of the ripest wisdom, and is based on the conviction, gained through experience, that life is worth living, that the victory is assured, and that the ends we pursue are of such excellence as to be incapable of ultimate defeat.”

Felix Adler

Section 4 : Moral Ideals
Founding Address (1876), Life and Destiny (1913)

“We propose to entirely exclude prayer and every form of ritual. Thus shall we avoid even the appearance of interfering with those to whom prayer and ritual, as a mode of expressing religious sentiment, are dear. And on the other hand we shall be just to those who have ceased to regard them as satisfactory and dispensed with them in their own persons.”

Felix Adler

Founding Address (1876)

“What I state as certain is certain for me. It has approved itself as such in my experience. Let others consult their experience, and see how far it tallies with that which is here set forth.”

Felix Adler

Book I, Ch. 1 "Prelude"
Founding Address (1876), An Ethical Philosopy of Life (1918)

“Statesmen and Philanthropists are busy suggesting remedies for the cure of these great evils. But the renovation of our Civil Service, the reform of our Primaries, and whatever other measures may be devised, they all depend in the last instance upon the fidelity of those to whom their execution must be entrusted. They will all fail unless the root of the evil be attacked, unless the conscience of men be aroused, the confusion of right and wrong checked, and the loftier purposes of our being again brought powerfully home to the hearts of the people.”

Felix Adler

Founding Address (1876)

“Religion is a wizard, a sibyl. She faces the wreck of worlds, and prophesies restoration. She faces a sky blood-red with sunset colours that deepen into darkness, and prophesies dawn. She faces death, and prophesies life.”

Felix Adler

Section 2 : Religion
Founding Address (1876), Life and Destiny (1913)

“Spiritual evolution is the progressive advance of mankind toward a state of things in which the light of ethical perfection shall be reflected from the face of human society; that is, in which all men shall live and move and have their being in mutually promoting the highest life of each and all. It means that the object of social reformation shall not be a mere change in the conditions under which men live, but a change in human nature itself. It means that we shall look forward consciously to the breaking forth of new powers in ourselves, to the release, through our own efforts, of capacities dimly latent in us.”

Felix Adler

Some Characteristics of the American Ethical Movement (1925)

“I believe in the supreme excellence of righteousness; I believe that the law of righteousness will triumph in the universe over all evil; I believe that in the attempt to fulfil the law of righteousness, however imperfect it must remain, are to be found the inspiration, the consolation, and the sanctification of human existence.
We live in order to finish an, as yet, unfinished universe, unfinished so far as the human, that is, the highest part of it, is concerned. We live in order to develop the superior qualities of man which are, as yet, for the most part latent.”

Felix Adler

Section 9 : Ethical Outlook
Life and Destiny (1913)

“The frontier of the higher life is everywhere contiguous to the common life, and we can cross the border at any moment. The higher life is as real as the grosser things in which we put our trust. But our eyes must be anointed so that we may see it.
The office of the religious teacher is to be a seer, and to make others see, and thus to win them into the upward way.”

Felix Adler

Section 9 : Ethical Outlook
Life and Destiny (1913)

“We should teach our children nothing which they shall ever need to unlearn; we should strive to transmit to them the best possessions, the truest thought, the noblest sentiments of the age in which we live.”

Felix Adler

Section 9 : Ethical Outlook
Life and Destiny (1913)

“To those who are longing for a higher life, who deeply feel the need of religious satisfactions, we suggest that there is a way in which the demands of the head and the heart may be reconciled. Religion is not necessarily allied with dogma, a new kind of faith is possible, based not upon legend and tradition, not upon the authority of any book, but upon the moral nature of man.”

Felix Adler

Life and Destiny (1913)

“There may be, and there ought to be, progress in the moral sphere. The moral truths which we have inherited from the past need to be expanded and restated. In times of misfortune we require for our support something of which the truth is beyond all question, in which we can put an implicit trust, " though the heavens should fall."”

Felix Adler

A merely borrowed belief is, at such time, like a rotten plank across a raging torrent. The moment we step upon it, it gives way beneath our feet.
Section 9 : Ethical Outlook
Life and Destiny (1913)

“The question what to believe is perhaps the most momentous that anyone can put to himself. Our beliefs are not to be classed among the luxuries, but among the necessaries of existence. They become particularly important in times of trouble. They are like the life-boats carried by ocean ships. As long as the sea is smooth and there is every appearance of a prosperous voyage, the passengers seldom take note of the boats or inquire into their sea-worthiness. But when the storm breaks and danger approaches, then the capacity of the boats and their soundness become matters of the first importance.”

Felix Adler

Section 9 : Ethical Outlook
Life and Destiny (1913)

“The right for the right's sake is the motto which everyone should take for his own life. With that as a standard of value we can descend into our hearts, appraise ourselves, and determine in how far we already are moral beings, in how far not yet.”

Felix Adler

Section 9 : Ethical Outlook
Life and Destiny (1913)

“The bitter, yet merciful, lesson which death teaches us is to distinguish the gold from the tinsel, the true values from the worthless chaff.
The terrible events of life are great eye-openers. They force us to learn that which it is wholesome for us to know, but which habitually we try to ignore — namely, that really we have no claim on a long life ; that we are each of us liable to be called off at any moment, and that the main point is not how long we live, but with what meaning we fill the short allotted span — for short it is at best.”

Felix Adler

Life and Destiny (1913)

“Let us learn from the lips of death the lessons of life. Let us live truly while we live, live for what is true and good and lasting. And let the memory of our dead help us to do this. For they are not wholly separated from us, if we remain loyal to them. In spirit they are with us. And we may think of them as silent, invisible, but real presences in our households.”

Felix Adler

Life and Destiny (1913)

“Our loss, indeed, will always remain loss, and no preaching or teaching can ever make it otherwise. But the question is whether it shall weaken and embitter, or strengthen and purify us, and lead us to raise to the dead we mourn a monument in our lives that shall be better than any pillared chapel or storied marble tomb.”

Felix Adler

Section 8 : Suffering and Consolation
Life and Destiny (1913)

“The condition of all progress is experience. We go wrong a thousand times before we find the right path. We struggle, and grope, and hurt ourselves until we learn the use of things, and this is true of things spiritual as well as of material things. Pain is unavoidable, but it acquires a new and higher meaning when we perceive that it is the price humanity must pay for an invaluable good.”

Felix Adler

Section 8 : Suffering and Consolation
Life and Destiny (1913)

“When the light of the sun shines through a prism it is broken into beautiful colours, and when the prism is shattered, still the light remains. So does the life of life shine resplendent in the forms of our friends, and so, when their forms are broken, still their life remains; and in that life we are united with them; for the life of their life is also our life, and we are one with them by ties indissoluble.”

Felix Adler

Section 8 : Suffering and Consolation
Life and Destiny (1913)

“It is written that the last enemy to be vanquished is death. We should begin early in life to vanquish this enemy by obliterating every trace of the fear of death from our minds. Then can we turn to life and fill the whole horizon of our souls with it, turn with added zest toall the serious tasks which it imposes and to the pure delights which here and there it affords.”

Felix Adler

Section 8 : Suffering and Consolation
Life and Destiny (1913)

“By what sort of experience are we led to the conviction that spirit exists ? On the whole, by searching, painful experience. The rose Religion grows on a thorn-bush, and we must not be afraid to have our fingers lacerated by the thorns if we would pluck the rose.”

Felix Adler

Section 7 : Spiritual Progress
Life and Destiny (1913)

“An ideal is a port toward which we resolve to steer. We may not reach it. The mere fact that our goal is definitely located does not suffice to conduct us thither. But surely we shall thus stand a better chance of making port in the end than if we drift about aimlessly, the sport of winds and tides, without having decided in our own minds in what direction we ought to bend our course.”

Felix Adler

Section 6 : Higher Life
Life and Destiny (1913)

“Man is like a tree, with the mighty trunk of intellect, the spreading branches of imagination, and the roots of the lower instincts that bind him to the earth. The moral life, however, is the fruit he bears; in it his true nature is revealed.
It is the prerogative of man that he need not blindly follow the law of his natural being, but is himself the author of a higher moral law, and creates it even in acting it out.”

Felix Adler

Section 6 : Higher Life
Life and Destiny (1913)

“Love is the expansion of two natures in such fashion that each include the other, each is enriched by the other.
Love is an echo in the feelings of a unity subsisting between two persons which is founded both on likeness and on complementary differences. Without the likeness there would be no attraction; without the challenge of the complementary differences there could not be the closer interweaving and the inextinguishable mutual interest which is the characteristic of all deeper relationships.”

Felix Adler

Section 5 : Love and Marriage
Life and Destiny (1913)

“The moral ideal would embrace the whole of life. In its sight nothing is petty or indifferent. It touches the veriest trifles and turns them into shining gold. We are royal by virtue of it, and like the kings in the fairy tale, we may never lay aside our crowns.
The moral order never is, but is ever becoming. It grows with our growth.”

Felix Adler

Section 4 : Moral Ideals
Life and Destiny (1913)

“Of the origin of things we know nothing, and can know nothing. Perfection does not reveal itself to us as existent in the beginning; but as something that ought to be, something new which we are to help create. Somehow the secret of the universe is hidden in our breast. Somehow the destinies of the universe depend upon our exertions.”

Felix Adler

Section 2 : Religion
Life and Destiny (1913)

“The divine in man is our sole ground for believing that there is anything divine in the universe outside of man. Man is the revealer of the divine.
At bottom, the world is to be interpreted in terms of joy, but of a joy that includes all the pain, includes it and transforms it and transcends it.
The Light of the World is a light that is saturated with the darkness which it has overcome and transfigured.”

Felix Adler

Section 1 : The Meaning of Life
Life and Destiny (1913)