American clergyman (1813-1887)
Suffering well borne is better than suffering removed.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Life Thoughts
A man can no more make money suddenly and largely, and be unharmed by it, than one could suddenly grow from a child's stature to a man's without harm.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
Sorrows are gardeners: they plant flowers along waste places, and teach vines to cover barren heaps.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
Never forget what a man has said to you when he was angry. If he has charged you with anything, you had better look it up. Anger is a bow that will shoot sometimes where another feeling will not.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Life Thoughts
Nothing in this world requires such long seasoning and ripening as new thoughts.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
Even a liar tells a hundred truths to one lie; he has to, to make the lie good for anything.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
Memory can glean, but can never renew. It brings us joys faint as is the perfume of the flowers, faded and dried, of the summer that is gone.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Life Thoughts
We go to the grave of a friend, saying, "A man is dead;" but angels throng about him, saying, "A man is born."
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Life Thoughts
As I grow older, and come nearer to death, I look upon it more and more with complacent joy, and out of every longing I hear God say, "O thirsting, hungering one, come to me." What the other life will bring I know not, only that I shall awake in God's likeness, and see him as he is. If a child had been born and spent all his life in the Mammoth Cave, how impossible would it be for him to comprehend the upper world! His parents might tell him of its life, and light, and beauty, and its sounds of joy; they might heap the sand into mounds, and try to show him by pointing to stalactites how grass, and flowers, and trees grow out of the ground, till at length, with laborious thinking, the child would fancy he had gained a true idea of the unknown land. And yet, though he longed to behold it, when the day came that he was to go forth, it would be with regret for the familiar crystals, and the rock-hewn rooms, and the quiet that reigned therein. But when he came up, some May morning, with ten thousand birds singing in the trees, and the heavens bright, and blue, and full of sunlight, and the wind blowing softly through the young leaves, all a-glitter with dew, and the landscape stretching away green and beautiful to the horizon, with what rapture would he gaze about him, and see how poor were all the fancyings and the interpretations which were made within the cave, of the things which grew and lived without; and how would he wonder that he could have regretted to leave the silence and the dreary darkness of his old abode! So, when we emerge from this cave of earth into that land where spring growths are, and where is summer, and not that miserable travesty which we call summer here, how shall we wonder that we could have clung so fondly to this dark and barren life!
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Life Thoughts
Death is the dropping of the flower, that the fruit may swell.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
No church can be prospered in which all the ministration comes from the pulpit.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
There is an army of waiters in this world.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
The two poorest men in the world are buckled together at the opposite sides of the circle. The man who has so much money that he does not know what to do with it and the man who has no money at all touch each other, as you will find; and one is about as poor as the other.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
The plainest row of books that cloth or paper ever covered is more significant of refinement than the most elaborately carved furniture.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
If every child might live the life predestined in a mother's heart, all the way from the cradle to the coffin, he would walk upon a beam of light, and shine in glory.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
Religion would save a man; Christ would make him worth saving.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
Take from the Bible the Godship of Christ, and it would be but a heap of dust.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
Christians are like vases, they must pass through the fire ere they can shine. The graces which are to be their everlasting beauty and glory must be burned in.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
Of all earthly music, that which reaches the farthest into heaven is the beating of a loving heart.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
Next to ingratitude, the most painful thing to bear is gratitude.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit