Henry Ward Beecher Quotes

Good men are not those who now and then do a good act, but men who join one good act to another.

Christ certainly did come to destroy the law and the prophets.

That endless book, the newspaper, is our national glory.

The man who perceives life only with his eye, his ear, his hand, and his tongue, is but little higher than the ox or an intelligent dog; but he who has imagination sees things around and above him, as the angels see them.

I don't like these cold, precise, perfect people, who, in order not to speak wrong, never speak at all, and in order not to do wrong, never do anything.

Your greatest pleasure is that which rebounds from hearts that you have made glad.

Men think God is destroying them because he is tuning them. The violinist screws up the key till the tense cord sounds the concert pitch; but it is not to break it, but to use it tunefully, that he stretches the string upon the musical rack.

Vigilance is not only the price of liberty, but of success of any sort.

Of all the music that reached farthest into heaven, it is the beating of a loving heart.

What I spent, I had; What I kept, I lost; What I gave, I have.

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.

God's glory is His goodness.

Self-denial does not belong to religion as characteristic of it; it belongs to human life; the lower nature must always be denied when you are trying to rise to a higher sphere.

The greatest architect and the one most needed is hope.

Nothing marks the change from the city to the country so much as the absence of grinding noises. The country is never silent. But its sounds are separate, distinct, and as it were, articulate.

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

God pardons like a mother, who kisses the offense into everlasting forgiveness.

In the ordinary business of life, industry can do anything which genius can do, and very many things which it cannot.

Trouble teaches men how much there is in manhood.

The natural term of an apple-pie is but twelve hours. It reaches its highest state about one hour after it comes from the oven, and just before its natural heat has quite departed. But every hour afterward is a declension. And after it is one day old, it is thence-forward but the ghastly corpse of apple-pie.

The sun does not shine for a few trees, and flowers, but for the wide world's joy. The lonely pine on the mountain-top waves its sombre boughs and cries, 'Thou art my sun.' And the little meadow violet lifts its cup of blue, and whispers with its perfumed breath, 'Thou art my sun.' And the grain in a thousand fields rustles in the wind, and makes answer, 'Thou art my sun.' So God sits effulgent in heaven, not for a favored few, but for the universe of life; and there is no creature so poor or so low that he may not look up with childish confidence and say, 'My Father, Thou art mine.

We know that the gifts which men have do not come from the schools. If a man is a plain, literal, factual man, you can make a great deal more of him in his own line by education than without education, just as you can make a great deal more of a potato if you cultivate it than if you do not; but no cultivation in this world will ever make an apple out of a potato.

Every boy wants someone older than himself to whom he may go in moods of confidence and yearning. The neglect of this child's want by grown people . . . is a fertile source of suffering.

If God but cares for our inward and eternal life, if by all the experiences of this life He is reducing it and preparing for its disclosure, nothing can befall us but prosperity. Every sorrow shall be but the setting of some luminous jewel of joy. Our very morning shall be but the enamel around the diamond; our very hardships but the metallic rim that holds the opal, glancing with strange interior fires.

No grace can save any man unless he helps himself.

When flowers are full of heaven-descended dews, they always hang their heads; but men hold theirs the higher the more they receive, getting proud as they get full.

Laws are not masters but servants, and he rules them who obey them.

There are many persons of combative tendencies, who read for ammunition, and dig out of the Bible iron for balls. They read, and they find nitre and charcoal and sulphur for powder. They read, and they find cannon. They read, and they make portholes and embrasures. And if a man does not believe as they do, they look upon him as an enemy, and let fly the Bible at him to demolish him. So men turn the word of God into a vast arsenal, filled with all manner of weapons, offensive and defensive.

Many a man has been dined out of his religion, and his politics, and his manhood, almost.

Every man should keep a fair-sized cemetery in which to bury the faults of his friends.

Titles are too "thin" for the nineteenth century.

Mirth is God's medicine. Everybody ought to bathe in it. Grim care, moroseness, anxiety,--all this rust of life, ought to be scoured off by the oil of mirth. It is better than emery. Every man ought to rub himself with it. A man without mirth is like a wagon without springs, in which one is caused disagreeably to jolt by every pebble over which it runs.

The morbid states of health, the irritableness of disposition arising from unstrung nerves, the impatience, the crossness, the fault-finding of men, who, full of morbid influences, are unhappy themselves, and throw the cloud of their troubles like a dark shadow upon others, teach us what eminent duty there is in health.

It is not work that kills men; it is worry. Worry is rust upon the blade.

Women are a new race, recreated since the world received Christianity.

God planted fear in the soul as truly as he planted hope or courage. Pear is a kind of bell, or gong, which rings the mind into quick life and avoidance upon the approach of danger. It is the soul's signal for rallying.

What if you have seen it before, ten thousand times over? An apple tree in full blossom is like a message, sent fresh from heaven to earth, of purity and beauty.

A man that does not know how to be angry does not know how to be good.

John Wesley quaintly observed that the road to heaven is a narrow path, not intended for wheels, and that to ride in a coach here and to go to heaven hereafter, was a happiness too much for man.

It is sometimes of God's mercy that men in the eager pursuit of worldly aggrandizement are baffled; for they are very like a train going down an inclined plane - putting on the brake is not pleasant, but it keeps the car on the track.

He who is false to present duty breaks a thread in the loom, and will find the flaw when he may have forgotten its cause.

That is true culture which helps us to work for the social betterment of all.

The ignorant classes are the dangerous classes.

In a great affliction there is no light either in the stars or in the sun; for when the inward light is fed with fragrant oil; there can be no darkness though the sun should go out. But when, like a sacred lamp in the temple, the inward light is quenched, there is no light outwardly, though a thousand suns should preside in the heavens.

I read for three things; first, to know what the world has done the last twenty-four hours, and is about to do today; second, for the knowledge that I specially want in my work; and third, for what will bring my mind into a proper mood.

If you have only two or three things that you can enjoy and they are things which time and decay may remove from you, what are you going to do in old age?

Sometimes fear is wholesome and rational; it is well to swing fear as a mighty battle-axe over men's heads when no other motive will move them.

If a man has come to that point where he is no content that he says; I do not want to know any more, or do any more or be any more, he is in a state in which he ought to be changed into a mummy.