American clergyman (1813-1887)
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
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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
Love is the wine of existence. When you have taken that, you have taken the most precious drop that there is in the cluster.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
No man rides so high and in such good company as the man that allies himself to a truth.
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
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
There is but one resource for innocence among men or women, and that is an embargo upon all commerce of bad men.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
Not to fear where there is occasion, is as great a weakness as to fear unduly, without reason.... Fear is a kind of bell, or gong, which rings the mind into quick life and avoidance upon the approach of danger.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Life Thoughts
We have the promises of God as thick as daisies in summer meadows, that death, which men most fear, shall be to us the most blessed of experiences, if we trust in him. Death is unclasping; joy, breaking out in the desert; the heart, come to its blossoming time! Do we call it dying when the bud bursts into flower?
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Life Thoughts
Forgiveness ought to be like a cancelled note, torn in two and burned up, so that it never can be shown against the man.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Life Thoughts
There is an ugly kind of forgiveness in this world--a kind of hedgehog forgiveness, shot out like quills.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
Doctrine is nothing but the skin of truth set up and stuffed.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
Good men's prayers are carried by the angelic mail; but many men's prayers evidently go by the demoniac route. They are never so bad as after they have prayed.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
Christians should be like a flower store: the odor of sanctity should betray them wherever they are.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
No grief has a right to immortality. That ground belongs to joy, to hope, to faith.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
Do not be troubled because you have not great virtues. God made a million spears of grass where he made one tree. The earth is fringed and carpeted, not with forests, but with grasses. Only have enough of little virtues and common fidelities, and you need not mourn because you are neither a hero nor a saint.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Life Thoughts
It is one of the severest tests of friendship to tell your friend his faults. If you are angry with a man, or hate him, it is not hard to go to him and stab him with words; but so to love a man that you cannot bear to see the stain of sin upon him, and to speak painful truth through loving words--that is friendship. But few have such friends. Our enemies usually teach us what we are, at the point of the sword.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Life Thoughts
Selfishness is that detestable vice which no one will forgive in others, and no one is without in himself.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Life Thoughts
Heaven will be inherited by every man who has heaven in his soul.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Life Thoughts
Love ... like a lamp, it needs to be fed out of the oil of another's heart, or its flame burns low.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit