HENRY WARD BEECHER QUOTES VIII

American clergyman (1813-1887)

That man is a Christian whose soul has learned to love; and he who has not learned to love, does not know the alphabet of Christianity.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit


A woman's pity often opens the door to love.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit


A lie always needs a truth for a handle to it, else the hand would cut itself which sought to drive it home upon another. The worst lies, therefore, are those whose blade is false, but whose handle is true.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Life Thoughts


There are some Christians whose secular life is an arid, worldly strife, and whose religion is but a turbid sentimentalism. Their life runs along that line where the overflow of the Nile meets the desert. It is the boundary line between sand and mud.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Life Thoughts


Let every man come to God in his own way.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Life Thoughts


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


Surely, of all things that are, snow is the most beautiful and the most feeble! Born of air-drops, less than the fallen dew, disorganized by a puff of warmth, driven everywhere by the least motion of the winds, each particle light and soft, and falling to the earth with such noiseless gentleness, that the wings of ten million times ten million makes no sound in the air, and the footfall of thrice as many makes no noise.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

attributed, Day's Collacon


There is no such thing as preaching patience into people, unless the sermon is so long that they have to practice it while they hear. No man can learn patience except by going out into the hurlyburly world, and taking life just as it blows. Patience is but lying to, and riding out the gale.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Life Thoughts


Amid the discords of this life, it is blessed to think of heaven, where God draws after him an everlasting train of music; for all thoughts are harmonious and all feelings vocal, and so there is round about his feet eternal melody.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Life Thoughts


The mischiefs of anarchy have been equaled by the mischiefs of government.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit


It usually takes a hundred years to make a law, and then, after it has done its work, it usually takes a hundred years to get rid of it.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit


Truth is the bread of a noble manhood.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit


As the imagination is set to look into the invisible and immaterial, it seems to attract something of their vitality; and though it can give nothing to the body to redeem it from years, it can give to the soul that freshness of youth in old age which is even more beautiful than youth in the young.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Life Thoughts


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


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


Life is a plant that grows out of death.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit


One might as well attempt to calculate mathematically the contingent forms of the tinkling bits of glass in a kaleidoscope as to look through the tube of the future and foretell its pattern.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Life Thoughts


God's hand, like a sign-board, is pointing toward democracy, and saying to the nations of the earth, "This is the way: walk ye in it."

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit


A man without a vote ... is like a man without a hand.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit