Henry Ward Beecher Quotes (306 Quotes)

True obedience is true freedom.

Repentance is another name for aspiration.

Newspapers are the schoolmasters of the common people.

There was never such a gigantic lie told as the fable of the Garden of Eden

There is not a time that you walk through the street, when if you employed your senses, you would not learn something worthwhile.

That for so many work is not a conscious choice but something that happens ... work is not the curse, drudgery is.

Do the best you can where you are, and when that is accomplished, God will open a door for you, and a voice will call Come up hither into a higher sphere

The test of Christian character should be that a man is a joy-bearing agent to the world.

Education is the knowledge of how to use the whole of oneself. Many men use but one or two faculties out of the score with which they are endowed. A man is educated who knows how to make a tool of every facultyhow to open it, how to keep it sharp, and how to apply it to all practical purposes.

Sink the Bible to the bottom of the ocean, and still man's obligations to God would be unchanged. He would have the same path to tread, only his lamp and his guide would be gone ....

Young love is a flame; very pretty, often very hot and fierce, but still only light and flickering. The love of the older and disciplined heart is as coals, deep-burning, unquenchable.

An oyster, that marvel of delicacy, that concentration of sapid excellence, that mouthful bwefore all other mouthfuls, who first had faith to believe it, and courage to execute The exterior is not persuasive.

Men strengthen each other in their faults. Those who are alike associate together, repeat the things which all believe, defend and stimulate their common faults of disposition, and each one receives from the others a reflection of his own egotism.

To array a man's will against his sickness is the supreme art of medicine.

Doctrine is nothing but the skin of truth set up and stuffed.

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

There are joys which long to be ours. God sends ten thousands truths, which come about us like birds seeking inlet; but we are shut up to them, and so they bring us nothing, but sit and sing awhile upon the roof, and then fly away.

God's providence is on the side of clear heads.

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.

A library is not a luxury but one of the necessities of life.

To become an able and successful man in any profession, three things are necessary, nature, study and practice.

The Bible is the most betrashed book in the world. Coming to it through commentaries is much like looking at a landscape through garret windows, over which generations of unmolested spiders have spun their webs.

Compassion will cure more sins than condemnation.

It is not the going out of port, but the coming in, that determines the success of a voyage.

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

Well-married, a man is winged ill-matched, he is shackled.

Ones best success comes after their greatest disappointments.

In this world it is not what we take up, but what we give up, that makes us rich.

A cup of coffee - real coffee - home-browned, home ground, home made, that comes to you dark as a hazel-eye, but changes to a golden bronze as you temper it with cream that never cheated, but was real cream from its birth, thick, tenderly yellow, perfectly sweet, neither lumpy nor frothing on the Java such a cup of coffee is a match for twenty blue devils and will exorcise them all.

Every tomorrow has two handles. We can take hold of it with the handle of anxiety or the handle of faith.

There are three schoolmasters for everybody that will employ them - the senses, intelligent companions, and books.

If you attempt to beat a man down and so get his goods for less than a fair price, you are attempting to commit burglary as much as though you broke into his shop to take the things without paying for them.

Every one has conscience enough to hate few have religion enough to love

There is no true and abiding morality that is not founded in religion.

Of all escape mechanisms, death is the most efficient.

Conceited men often seem a harmless kind of men, who, by an overweening self-respect, relieve others from the duty of respecting them at all.

Clothes and manners do not make the man; but, when he is made, they greatly improve his appearance.

There is no slave out of heaven like a loving woman and, of all loving women, there is no such slave as a mother

Free speech is to a great people what winds are to oceans and malarial regions, which waft away the elements of disease and bring new elements of health and where free speech is stopped, miasma is bred, and death comes fast.

If a man has come to that point where he is so 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 of which he ought to be changed into a mummy

What we call wisdom is the result of all the wisdom of past ages. Our best institutions are like young trees growing upon the roots of the old trunks that have crumbled away.

The dog is the god of frolic.

Poverty is very good in poems but very bad in the house very good in maxims and sermons but very bad in practical life.

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

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

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

A grindstone that had not grit in it, how long would it take to sharpen an axe And affairs that had not grit in them how long would they take to make a man.

Suffering is part of the divine idea.

Love cannot endure indifference. It needs to be wanted. Like a lamp, it needs to be fed out of the oil of another's heart, or its flame burns low.

A man's true state of power and riches is to be in himself.