HENRY WARD BEECHER QUOTES VI

American clergyman (1813-1887)

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When a nation's young men are conservative, its funeral-bell is already rung.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

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Public sentiment is to public officers what water is to the wheel of the mill.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

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Men go shopping just as men go out fishing or hunting, to see how large a fish may be caught with the smallest hook.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

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Repentance is the turning of the soul from the way of midnight to the point of the coming sun.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

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There are not anywhere else so many ways of trickery, so many false lights, so many veils, so many guises, so many illusive deceits, as are practiced in every man's conscience in respect to his motives, thoughts, feelings, conduct, and character.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

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No people are so easy to govern as the intelligent, and none are so hard to govern as the ignorant.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

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Men are not put into this world to be everlastingly played on by the harping fingers of joy.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

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The way to begin a Christian life is not to study theology. Piety before theology. Right living will produce right thinking. Yet many men, when their consciences are aroused, run for catechisms, and commentaries, and systems. They do not mean to be shallow Christians. They intend to be thorough, if they enter upon the Christian life at all. Now, theologies are well in their place; but repentance and love must come before all other experiences. First a cure for your sin-sick soul, and then theologies. Suppose a man were taken with the cholera, and, instead of sending for a physician, he should send to a bookstore, and buy all the books which have been written on the human system, and, while the disease was working in his vitals, he should say, "I'll not put myself in the hands of any of these doctors. I shall probe this thing to the bottom." Would it not be better for him first to be cured of the cholera?

HENRY WARD BEECHER

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There is no greater crime than to stand between a man and his development; to take any law or institution and put it around him like a collar, and fasten it there, so that as he grows and enlarges, he presses against it till he suffocates and dies.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

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God designed men to grow as trees grow in open pastures, full-boughed all around; but men in society grow like trees in forests, tall and spindling, the lower ones overshadowed by the higher, with only a little branching, and that at the top. They borrow of each other the power to stand; and if the forest be cleared, and one be left alone, the first wind which comes uproots it.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

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Faith means a sanctified imagination, or the imagination applied to spiritual things.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

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The mind has no kitchen to do its dirty work in while the parlor remains clean.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

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We need not fear shipwreck when God is the pilot.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

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Riches are not an end of life but an instrument of life.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

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The grossest, the cruelest, the most selfish, the most easily pervertible and perverted thing in this world, is government.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

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It is not the going out of port, but the coming in, that determines the success of a voyage.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

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A man never has good luck who has a bad wife.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

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A man has no more religion than he acts out in his life.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

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This world is magnificent for strangers and pilgrims, but miserable for residents.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

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Words are but the bannerets of a great army, a few bits of waving color here and there; thoughts are the main body of the footman that march unseen below.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

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