Henry Ward Beecher Quotes
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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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Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures.
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Like the cellar-growing vine is the Christian who lives in the darkness and bondage of fear. But let him go forth, with the liberty of God, into the light of love, and he will be like the plant in the field, healthy, robust, and joyful.
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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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October is the opal month of the year. It is the month of glory, of ripeness. It is the picture-month.
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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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At the bottom of every leaf-stem is a cradle, and in it is an infant germ; the winds will rock it, the birds will sing to it all summer long, but the next season it will unfold and go alone.
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It takes a man to make a devil; and the fittest man for such a purpose is a snarling, waspish, red-hot, fiery creditor.
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The prouder a man is, the more he thinks he deserves, and the more he thinks he deserves, the less he really does deserve.
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Riches are not an end of life, but an instrument of life.
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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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Men judge of Christians by taking as fair samples those that lie rotten on the ground.
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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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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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Self-government by the whole people is the teleologic idea. The republican form of government is the noblest and the best, as it is the latest.
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It is the very wantonness of folly for a man to search out the frets and burdens of his calling and give his mind every day to a consideration of them. They belong to human life. They are inevitable. Brooding only gives them strength.
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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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All things in the natural world symbolize God, yet none of them speak of him but in broken and imperfect words. High above all he sits, sublimer than mountains, grander than storms, sweeter than blossoms and tender fruits, nobler than lords, truer than parents, more loving than lovers. His feet tread the lowest places of the earth; but his head is above all glory, and everywhere he is supreme.
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A Christian is nothing but a sinful man who has put himself to school for Christ for the honest purpose of becoming better.
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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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Every boy wants someone older than himself to whom he may go in moods of confidence and yearning. The neglect of this child's want by grown people . . . is a fertile source of suffering.
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If men had wings and bore black feathers, Few of them would be clever enough to be crows.
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Home should be the center of joy, equatorial and tropical.
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Mirthfulness is in the mind, and you cannot get it out. It is the blessed spirit that God has set in the mind to dust it, to enliven its dark places, and to drive asceticism, like a foul fiend, out at the back door. It is just as good, in its place, as conscience or veneration. Praying can no more be made a substitute for smiling than smiling can for praying.