Henry Ward Beecher Quotes
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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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He who hunts for flowers will finds flowers; and he who loves weeds will find weeds.
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Debt rolls a man over and over, binding him hand and foot, and letting him hang upon the fatal mesh until the long-legged interest devours him.
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What profusion is there in His work! When trees blossom there is not a single breastpin, but a whole bosom full of gems; and of leaves they have so many suits that they can throw them away to the winds all summer long. What unnumbered cathedrals has He reared in the forest shades, vast and grand, full of curious carvings, and haunted evermore by tremulous music; and in the heavens above, how do stars seem to have flown out of His hand faster than sparks out of a mighty forge!
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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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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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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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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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A babe is nothing but a bundle of possibilities.
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We are but a point, a single comma, and God is the literature of eternity.
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Our flag means all that our fathers meant in the Revolutionary War. It means all that the Declaration of Independence meant. It means justice. It means liberty. It means happiness.... Every color means liberty. Every thread means liberty. Every star and stripe means liberty.
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A republican government in a hundred points is weaker than an autocratic government; but in this one point it is the strongest that ever existed — it has educated a race of men that are men.
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Newspapers are to the body politic what arteries are to the human body, their function being to carry blood and sustenance and repair to every part of the body.
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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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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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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.
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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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Nothing can compare in beauty, and wonder, and admirableness, and divinity itself, to the silent work in obscure dwellings of faithful women bringing their children to honor and virtue and piety.
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Riches are not an end of life, but an instrument of life.
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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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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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Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures.
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A cunning man overreaches no one half as much as himself.