HENRY WARD BEECHER QUOTES VIII

American clergyman (1813-1887)

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Some plants of the bitterest root have the whitest and sweetest blossoms; so the bitterest wrong has the sweetest repentance.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

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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

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One of the affecting features in a life of vice is the longing, wistful outlooks given by the wretches who struggle with unbridled passions, towards virtues which are no longer within their reach. Men in the tide of vice are sometimes like the poor creatures swept down the stream of mighty rivers, who see people safe on shore, and trees, and flowers, as they go quickly past; and all things that are desirable gleam upon them for a moment to heighten their trouble, and to aggravate their swift-coming destruction.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

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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

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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

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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

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It takes a man to make a devil.

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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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

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He is rich or poor according to what he is, not according to what he has.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

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Woman began at zero, and has through ages slowly unfolded and risen. Each age has protested against growth as unsexing woman.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

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Truth is the bread of a noble manhood.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

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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

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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

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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

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The worst thing in this world, next to anarchy, is government.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

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Make men large and strong, and tyranny will bankrupt itself in making shackles for them.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

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There is in youth a purity of character which, when once touched and defiled, can never be restored; a fringe more delicate than frost-work, and which, when torn and broken, can never be re-embroidered.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

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That energy which makes a child hard to manage is the energy which afterward makes him a manager of life.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

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Let every man come to God in his own way.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

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