Henry Ward Beecher Quotes

The philosophy of one century is the common sense of the next.

October is nature's funeral month. Nature glories in death more than in life. The month of departure is more beautiful than the month of coming - October than May. Every green thin loves to die in bright colors.

No man is such a conqueror, as the one that has defeated himself.

The soul is a temple; and God is silently building it by night and by day. Precious thoughts are building it; disinterested love is building it; all-penetrating faith is building it.

Death? Translated into the heavenly tongue, that word means life!

See to it that each hour's feelings, and thoughts, and actions are pure and true; then will your life be such.

We are not to make the ideas of contentment and aspiration quarrel, for God made them fast friends. A man may aspire, and yet be quite content until it is time to raise; and both flying and resting are but parts of one contentment. The very fruit of the gospel is aspiration. It is to the heart what spring is to the earth, making every root, and bud, and bough desire to be more.

The bibliophile is the master of his books, the bibliomaniac their slave.

There is nothing that makes more cowards and feeble men than public opinion.

I never knew how to worship until I knew how to love.

Flowers are sent to do God's work in unrevealed paths, and to diffuse influence by channels that we hardly suspect.

Flattery is praise insincerely given for an interested purpose.

But when we borrow trouble, and look forward into the future to see what storms are coming, and distress ourselves before they come as to how we shall avert them if they ever do come, we lose our proper trustfulness in God. When we torment ourselves with imaginary dangers, or trials, or reverses, we have already parted with that perfect love which casteth out fear.

Some have supposed that the mosquito is of a devout turn, and never will partake of a meal without first saying grace. The devotions of some men are but a preface to blood-sucking.

The grossest, the cruelest, the most selfish, the most easily pervertible and perverted thing in this world, is government.

A bird in a cage is not half a bird.

THERE are joys which long to be ours.

You cannot sift out the poor from the community. The poor are indispensable to the rich.

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 or a saint.

No coffee can be good in the mouth that does not first send a sweet offering of odor to the nostrils.

Sorrow is Mount Sinai. If one will, one may go up and talk with God, face to face.

Morality is good, and is accepted of God, as far as it goes; but the difficulty is, it does not go far enough.

Every young man would do well to remember that all successful business stands on the foundation of morality.

The real democratic American idea is, not that every man shall be on a level with every other man, but that every man shall have liberty to be what God made him, without hindrance.

The diameter of each day is measured by the stretch of thought - not by the rising and setting of the sun.

There is a temperate zone in the mind, between luxurious indolence and exacting work; and it is to this region, just between laziness and labor, that summer reading belongs.

Men of dissolute lives have little incentive to look forward to the hopes and glories of immortality. A due conception of these would be incompatible with such a life.

Never be grandiloquent when you want to drive home a searching truth. Don't whip with a switch that has the leaves on, if you want it to tingle.

It is one of the worst effects of prosperity to make a man a vortex instead of a fountain; so that, instead of throwing out, he learns only to draw in.

Nowhere else can one find so miscellaneous, so various, an amount of knowledge as is contained in a good newspaper.

A thoughtful mind, when it sees a Nation's flag, sees not the flag only, but the Nation itself; and whatever may be its symbols, its insignia, he reads chiefly in the flag the Government, the principles, the truths, the history which belongs to the Nation that sets it forth.

I have known many an instance of a man writing a letter and forgetting to sign his name, but this is the only instance I have ever known of a man signing his name and forgetting to write the letter.

Despondency is ingratitude; hope is God's worship.