Henry Ward Beecher Quotes (306 Quotes)

Sharp men, like sharp needles, break easy, though they pierce quick.

When we borrow trouble, and look forward into the future and 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.

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

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

We are always on the anvil; by trials God is shaping us for higher things.

It's easier to go down a hill than up it but the view is much better at the top.

Like a bird she seems to wear gay plumage unconsciously, as if it grew upon her.

For fidelity, devotion, love, many a two-legged animal is below the dog and the horse. Happy would it be for thousands of people if they could stand at last before the Judgment Seat and say 'I have loved as truly and I have lived as decently as my dog.' And yet we call them 'only brutes'

Whatever is only almost true is quite false, and among the most dangerous of errors, because being so near truth, it is the more likely to lead astray

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.

The ability to convert ideas to things is the secret of outward success.

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

By Labor the North has subdued Nature, changed a parsimonious soil to fertility, built dwellings for almost her whole population, raised the school-house, established the Church, encircled the globe with her ships, and made her books and her papers to be as blades of grass and as leave of the Summer for number. But in the South, labor, a badge of shame, is the father of misery. The slave labors, but with no cheerit is not the road to respectability, it will honor him with no citizens trust, it brings no bread to his family, no grain to his garner, no leisure in after-days, no books or papers to his children. It opens no school-house door, builds no church, rears for him no factory, lays no keel, fills no bank, earns no acres. With sweat and toil and ignorance he consumes his life, to pour the earnings into channels from which he does no drink, into hands that never honor him. But perpetually rob and often torment.

There is no friendship, no love, like that of the parent for the child.

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

Tears are often the telescope through which men see far into heaven.

Success is full of promise till one gets it, and then it seems like a nest from which the bird has flown.

Sink the Bible to the bottom of the sea, and man's obligation to God would be unchanged. He would have the same path to tread, only his lamp and his guide would be gone he would have the same voyage to make, only his compass and chart would be overboard.

It is one of the severest tests of friendship to tell your friend his faults. So to love a man that you cannot bear to see a stain upon him, and to speak painful truth through loving words, that is friendship.

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

Love, like a lamp, needs to be fed out of another's heart, or its flame burns low.

Sorrow makes men sincere.

Law represents the effort of man to organize society; governments, the efforts of selfishness to overthrow liberty.

Troubles are often the tools by which God fashions us for better things.

The humblest individual exerts some influence, either for good or evil, upon others.

What a mother sings to the cradle goes all the way down to the coffin.

You never know till you try to reach them how accessible men are but you must approach each man by the right door.

The head learns new things, but the heart forever practices old experiences.

When a man says that he is perfect already, there are only two places for him, and that is heaven or the lunatic asylum.

Of all earthly music that which reaches farthest into heaven is the beating of a truly loving heart

Take all the robes of all the good judges that have ever lived on the face of the earth, and they would not be large enough to cover the iniquity of one corrupt judge

We should not judge people by their peak of excellence; but by the distance they have traveled from the point where they started.

Man is at the bottom an animal, midway a citizen, and at the top divine. But the climate of this world is such that few ripen at the top.

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.

Where is human nature so weak as in the bookstore?

Heaven will be inherited by every man who has heaven in his soul.

Men are like trees each one must put forth the leaf that is created in him.

Laughter is not a bad beginning for a friendship, and it is the best ending for one.

There is no faculty of the human soul so persistent and universal as that of hatred.

As for marigolds, poppies, hollyhocks, and valorous sunflowers, we shall never have a garden without them, both for their own sake, and for the sake of old-fashioned folks, who used to love them.

It is not well for a man to pray cream and live skim milk.

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

There never was a person that did anything worth doing who did not really receive more than he gave

Men will let you abuse them only if you make them laugh.

Flattery is praise insincerely given for an interested purpose.

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 difference between perseverance and obstinacy is that one comes from a strong will, and the other from a strong won't.

To spend several days in a friend's house and hunger for something to read, while you are treading on costly carpets, and sitting upon luxurious chairs and sleeping upon down, is as if one were bribing your body for the sake of cheating your mind

You cannot find in the New Testament any of those hateful representations of dying which men have invented, by which death is portrayed as a ghastly skeleton with a scythe, or something equally revolting. The figures by which death is represented in the N.

In this world, full often, our joys are only the tender shadows which our sorrows cast.