Henry Ward Beecher Quotes
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There is no slave out of heaven like a loving woman; and of all loving women, there is no such slave as a mother.
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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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God washes the eyes by tears until they can behold the invisible land where tears shall come no more. O love! O affliction! ye are the guides that show us the way through the great airy space where our loved ones walked; and, as hounds easily follow the scent before the dew be risen, so God teaches us, while yet our sorrow is wet, to follow on and find our dear ones in heaven.
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The man who perceives life only with his eye, his ear, his hand, and his tongue, is but little higher than the ox or an intelligent dog; but he who has imagination sees things around and above him, as the angels see them.
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No cradle for an emperor's child was ever prepared with so much magnificence as this world has been made for man. But it is only his cradle.
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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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Books are not men and yet they stay alive.
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Faith is spiritualized imagination.
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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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There are persons so radiant, so genial, so kind, so pleasure-bearin g, that you instinctively feel in their presence that they do you good; whose coming into a room is like bringing a lamp there.
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Like waves, our feelings may continue by repeating themselves, by intermittent rushes.
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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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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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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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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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Life is a plant that grows out of death.
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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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He who is false to present duty breaks a thread in the loom, and will find the flaw when he may have forgotten its cause.
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A man is a fool who sits looking backward from himself in the past. Ah, what shallow, vain conceit there is in man! Forget the things that are behind. That is not where you live. Your roots are not there. They are in the present; and you should reach up into the other life.
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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.
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A little library, growing every year, is an honorable part of a man’s history. It is a man’s duty to have books.
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Nature is a vast repository of manly enjoyments.
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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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It is not the going out of port, but the coming in, that determines the success of a voyage.