HENRY WARD BEECHER QUOTES VIII

American clergyman (1813-1887)

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

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit


Little lies are very dangerous, because there are so many of them, and because each one of them scours upon the character as diamond-pointed.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit


Wealth held by a class and used ambitiously becomes as despotic as an absolute monarchy, and has in its hands manners, customs, laws, institutions, and governments themselves.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit


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


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


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


Newspapers are to the body politic what arteries are to the human body, their function being to carry blood and sustenance and repair to every part of the body.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit


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

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit


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


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


It takes a man to make a devil.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit


Let every man come to God in his own way.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Life Thoughts


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

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit


Truth is the bread of a noble manhood.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit


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

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit


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

Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit


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

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit


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


Men's graces must get the better of their faults as a farmer's crops do of the weeds--by growth. When the corn is low, the farmer uses the plough to root up the weeds; but when it is high, and shakes its palm-like leaves in the wind, he says, "Let the corn take care of them," for the dense shadow of growing corn is as fatal to weeds as the edge of the sickle.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Life Thoughts


It is not well for a man to pray cream, and live skim milk.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Life Thoughts