Henry Ward Beecher Quotes
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To know that one has a secret is to know half the secret itself.
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Remember God's bounty in the year. String the pearls of His favor. Hide the dark parts, except so far as they are breaking out in light! Give this one day to thanks, to joy, to gratitude!
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Books are not men and yet they stay alive.
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Books are not made for furniture, but there is nothing else that so beautifully furnishes a house.
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Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures.
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The first hour of the morning is the rudder of the day.
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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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Our life is in the loom; it rolls up and is hidden as fast as it is woven. It is to be taken out of the loom only when we leave this world; then only shall we see the pattern.
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Nothing can be more airy and beautiful than the transparent seed-globe-a fairy dome of splendid architecture.
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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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God has made sleep to be a sponge by which to rub out fatigue. A man's roots are planted in night as in a soil.
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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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All true religion must stand on true morality.
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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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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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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.
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When a man sells eleven ounces for twelve, he makes a compact with the devil, and sells himself for the value of an ounce.
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What place is so rugged and so homely that there is no beauty; if you only have a sensibility to beauty?
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Men think God is destroying them because he is tuning them. The violinist screws up the key till the tense cord sounds the concert pitch; but it is not to break it, but to use it tunefully, that he stretches the string upon the musical rack.
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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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Repentance may begin instantly, but reformation often requires a sphere of years.
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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.
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Ignorance is the womb of monsters.
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Your greatest pleasure is that which rebounds from hearts that you have made glad.