American clergyman (1813-1887)
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
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
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
Life Thoughts
We sleep, but the loom of life never stops; and the pattern which was weaving when the sun went down is weaving when it comes up tomorrow.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Life Thoughts
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
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
A law is valuable, not because it is a law, but because there is right in it.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Life Thoughts
A man never has good luck who has a bad wife.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Twelve Lectures to Young Men
Perverted pride is a great misfortune in men; but pride in its original function, for which God created it, is indispensable to a proper manhood.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
Some critics, and for that matter most of them, I fear, rejoice in faults as buzzards do in carrion, to feed upon it; but a true critic is a surgeon, who cuts away the wen, or imposthume, that he may rejoice in the cleanness of a body restored to health.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
The worst thing in this world, next to anarchy, is government.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
There is not on earth so base a knave as the man who wins the love of a woman when he knows that he cannot or ought not to requite it.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
Truth is the bread of a noble manhood.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
We need not fear shipwreck when God is the pilot.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
An ambition which has conscience in it will always be a laborious and faithful engineer, and will build the road, and bridge the chasms between itself and eminent success by the most faithful and minute performances of duty.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Life Thoughts
He is rich or poor according to what he is, not according to what he has.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
I am suspicious of that church whose members are one in their beliefs and opinions. When a tree is dead, it will lie any way; alive, it will have its own growth. When men's deadness is in the church, and their life elsewhere, all will be alike. They can be cut and polished any way. When they are alive, they are like a tropical forest--some shooting up, like the mahogany tree; some spreading, like the vine; some darkling, like the shrub; some lying, herb-like, on the ground; but all obeying their own laws of growth--a common law of growth variously expressed in each--and so contributing to the richness and beauty of the wood.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Life Thoughts
Patriotism, in our day, is made to be an argument for all public wrong, and all private meanness. For the sake of country a man is told to yield every thing that makes the land honorable. For the sake of country a man must submit to every ignominy that will lead to the ruin of the state through disgrace of the citizen. There never was a man so unpatriotic as Christ was. Old Jerusalem ought to have been everything to him. The laws and institutions of his country ought to have been more to him than all the men in his country. They were not, and the Jews hated him; but the common people, like the ocean waters, moved in tides towards his heavenly attraction wherever he went.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Life Thoughts
The beginning is the promise of the end.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Life Thoughts
The cynic is one who never sees a good quality in a man, and never fails to see a bad one. He is the human owl, vigilant in darkness, and blind to light, mousing for vermin, and never seeing noble game.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
The mischiefs of anarchy have been equaled by the mischiefs of government.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
This world is magnificent for strangers and pilgrims, but miserable for residents.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit