Henry Ward Beecher Quotes
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Men do not avail themselves of the riches of God's grace. They love to nurse their cares, and seem as uneasy without some fret as an old friar would be without his hair girdle. They are commanded to cast their cares upon the Lord, but even when they attempt it, they do not fail to catch them up again, and think it meritorious to walk burdened.
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The first hour of the morning is the rudder of the day.
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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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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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The Church is not a gallery for the exhibition of eminent Christians, but a school for the education of imperfect ones.
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Make men large and strong and tyranny will bankrupt itself in making shackles for them.
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Home should be the center of joy, equatorial and tropical.
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The deeper men go into life, the deeper is their conviction that this life is not all. It is an unfinished symphony. A day may round out an insect's life, and a bird or a beast needs no tomorrow. Not so with him who knows that he is related to God and has felt the power of an endless life.
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The philosophy of one century is the common sense of the next.
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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?
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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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I never know how to worship until I know how to love; and to love I must have something that I can put my arms around, — something that, touching my heart, shall leave not the chill of ice, but the warmth of summer.
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Now, men think, with regard to their conduct, that, if they were to lift themselves up gigantically and commit some crashing sin, they should never be able to hold up their heads; but they will harbor in their souls little sins, which are piercing and eating them away to inevitable ruin.
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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.
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God puts the excess of hope in one man, in order that it may be a medicine to the man who is despondent.
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But there have been human hearts, constituted just like ours, for six thousand years. The same stars rise and set upon this globe that rose upon the plains of Shinar or along the Egyptian Nile and the same sorrows rise and set in every age.
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Men can make an idol of the Bible.
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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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Vigilance is not only the price of liberty, but of success of any sort.
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There are many persons who look on Sunday as a sponge to wipe out the sins of the week.
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I would rather speak the truth to ten men than blandishments and lying to a million. Try it, ye who think there is nothing in it! Try what it is to speak with God behind you, to speak so as to be only the arrow in the bow which the Almighty draws.
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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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Ignorance is the womb of monsters.
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Morality is character and conduct such as is required by the circle or community in which the man's life happens to be placed. It shows how much good men require of us.