Henry Ward Beecher Quotes
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Providence is but another name for natural law. Natural law itself would go out in a minute if it were not for the divine thought that is behind it.
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Memory can glean, but can never renew. It brings us joys faint as is the perfume of the flowers, faded and dried, of the summer that is gone.
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We need not fear shipwreck when God is the pilot.
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Repentance may begin instantly, but reformation often requires a sphere of years.
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I will not say it is not Christian to make beads of others faults, and tell them over every day; I say it is infernal. If you want to know how the Devil feels, you do know, if you are such an one.
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A mother has, perhaps, the hardest earthly lot; and yet no mother worthy of the name ever gave herself thoroughly for her child who did not feel that, after all, she reaped what she had sown.
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Suffering well borne is better than suffering removed.
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Home should be the center of joy, equatorial and tropical.
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There is nothing which vanity does not desecrate.
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To know that one has a secret is to know half the secret itself.
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I have known men who thought the object of conversion was to cleanse them as a garment is cleansed, and that when they are converted they were to be hung up in the Lord's wardrobe, the door of which was to be shut, so that no dust could get at them. A coat that is not used the moths eat; and a Christian who is hung up so that he shall not be tempted, the moths eat him; and they have poor food at that.
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Every man should use his intellect, not as he uses his lamp in the study, only for his own seeing, but as the lighthouse uses its lamps, that those afar off on the seas may see the shining, and learn their way.
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That is the best baptism that leaves the man cleanest inside.
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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.
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No coffee can be good in the mouth that does not first send a sweet offering of odor to the nostrils.
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Self-contemplation is apt to end in self-conceit.
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As the cream abandons the milk from which it took its life, and rises to the top and rides there, so men, because they are richer than those around about them, separate themselves, and all mankind below them they regard as skim milk.
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The aster has not wasted spring and summer because it has not blossomed. It has been all the time preparing for what is to follow, and in autumn it is the glory of the field, and only the frost lays it low. So there are many people who must live forty or fifty years, and have the crude sap of their natural dispositions changed and sweetened before the blossoming time can come; but their lives have not been wasted.
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The last person one wants to be is themselves. Sadly, that is the best person to be.
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God is like us to this extent, that whatever in us is good is like God.
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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.
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He who hunts for flowers will finds flowers; and he who loves weeds will find weeds.
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The first hour of the morning is the rudder of the day.
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The philosophy of one century is the common sense of the next.