Henry Ward Beecher Quotes

Sorrows, as storms, bring down the clouds close to the earth; sorrows bring heaven down close; and they are instruments of cleansing and purifying.

Men do not avail themselves of the riches of God's grace. They love to nurse their cares, and seem as uneasy without some fret as an old friar would be without his hair girdle. They are commanded to cast their cares upon the Lord, but even when they attempt it, they do not fail to catch them up again, and think it meritorious to walk burdened.

Selfishness at the expense of others happiness is demonism.

No emotion, any more than a wave, can long retain its own individual form.

Some men are like pyramids, which are very broad where they touch the ground, but grow narrow as they reach the sky.

There is nothing that a New-Englander so nearly worships as an argument.

Your honors here may serve you for a time, as it were for an hour, but they will be of no use to you beyond this world. Nobody will have heard a word of your honors in the other life. Your glory, your shame, your ambitions, and all the treasures for which you push hard and sacrifice much will be like wreaths of smoke. For these things, which you mostly seek, and for which you spend your life only tarry with you while you are on this side of the flood.

Whenever education and refinement carry us away from the common people, they are growing towards selfishness, which is the monster evil of the world. That is true cultivation which gives us sympathy with every form of human life, and enables us to work most successfully for its advancement. Refinement that carries us away from our fellow people is not God's refinement.

Fear is the soul's signal for rallying.

There are apartments in the soul which have a glorious outlook; from whose windows you can see across the river of death, and into the shining city beyond; but how often are these neglected for the lower ones, which have earthward-looking windows.

The truest self-respect is not to think of self.

A noble man compares and estimates himself by an idea which is higher than himself, and a mean man, by one lower than himself.

All the wide world is but the husbandry of God for the development of the one fruit-man.

While a man is stringing a harp, he tries the strings, not for music, but for construction. When it is finished it shall be played for melodies. God is fashioning the human heart for future joy. He only sounds a string here and there to see how far His work has progressed.

All true religion must stand on true morality.

Every fresh act of benevolence is the herald of deeper satisfaction; every charitable act a stepping-stone towards heaven.

Astronomers have built telescopes which can show myriads of stars unseen before; but when a man looks through a tear in his own eye, that is a lens which opens reaches into the unknown, and reveals orbs which no telescope, however skilfully constructed, could do.

Truthfulness is godliness.

Many men build as cathedrals are built-the part nearest the ground finished, but that part which soars toward heaven, the turrets and the spires, forever incomplete.

Do not give, as many rich men do, like a hen that lays her eggs ...and then cackles.

The strong are God's natural protectors of the weak.

Gratitude is the fairest blossom which springs from the soul.

A little library, growing every year, is an honorable part of a man’s history. It is a man’s duty to have books.

Every man should be born again on the first day of January. Start with a fresh page. Take up one hole more in the buckle if necessary, or let down one, according to circumstances; but on the first of January let every man gird himself once more, with his face to the front, and take no interest in the things that were and are past.

Love is the world's river of life

The real man is one who always finds excuses for others, but never excuses himself.

A house built on sand is, in fair weather, just as good as if builded on a rock. A cobweb is as good as the mightiest chain cable when there is no strain on it. It is trial that proves one thing weak and another strong.

When our children die, we drop them into the unknown, shuddering with fear. We know that they go out from us, and we stand, and pity, and wonder. If we receive news, that a hundred thousand dollars had been left them by some one dying, we should be thrown into an ecstasy of rejoicing; but when they have gone home to God, we stand, and mourn, and pine, and wonder at the mystery of Providence.

Men will imitate and admire his unmoved firmness, his inflexible conscience for the right; and yet his gentleness, as tender as a woman's, his moderation of spirit, which not all the heat of party could inflame, nor all the jars and disturbances of this country shake out of its place: I swear you to an emulation of his justice, his moderation, and his mercy.

Precise knowledge is the only true knowledge, and he who does not teach exactly, does not teach at all.

Mirth is God's medicine. Everybody ought to bathe in it.

Oftentimes great and open temptations are the most harmless because they come with banners flying and bands playing and all the munitions of war in full view, so that we know we are in the midst of enemies that mean us damage, and we get ready to meet and resist them. Our peculiar dangers are those that surprise us and work treachery in our fort.

Religion is the fruit of the Spirit, a Christian character, a true life.

No man is sane who does not know how to be insane on proper occasions.

To the covetous man life is a nightmare, and God lets him wrestle with it as best he may.

There can be no high civilization where there is not ample leisure.

A tool is but the extension of a man's hand, and a machine is but a complex tool. And he that invents a machine augments the power of a man and the well-being of mankind.

People may excite in themselves a glow of compassion, not by toasting their feet at the fire, and saying: "Lord, teach me compassion," but by going and seeking an object that requires compassion.

Mirthfulness is in the mind and you cannot get it out. It is just as good in its place as conscience or veneration.

God's sovereignty is not in His right hand; God's sovereignty is not in His intellect; God's sovereignty is in His love.

He who hunts for flowers will finds flowers; and he who loves weeds will find weeds.

Give us that calm certainty of truth, that nearness to Thee, that conviction of the reality of the life to come, which we shall need to bear us through the troubles of this.

Every green thing loves to die in bright colors. The vegetable cohorts march glowing out of the year in flaming dresses, as if to leave this earth were a triumph and not a sadness. It is never nature that is sad, but only we, that dare not look back on the past, and that have not its prophecy of the future in our bosoms.

Nothing dies so hard, or rallies so often as intolerance.

It is a view of God that compensates every thing else, and enables the soul to rest in His bosom. How, when the child in the night screams with terror, hearing sounds that it knows not of, is that child comforted and put to rest? Is it by a philosophical explanation that the sounds were made by the rats in the partition? Is it by imparting entomological knowledge? No; it is by the mother taking the child in her lap, and singing sweetly to it, and rocking it. And the child thinks nothing of the explanation, but only of the mother.

He who only does not appreciate floral beauty is to be pitied like any other man who is born imperfect. It is a misfortune not unlike blindness.

Half the spiritual difficulties that men and women suffer arise from a morbid state of health.

Gambling with cards or dice or stocks is all one thing. It's getting money without giving an equivalent for it.