Henry Ward Beecher Quotes
-
To know that one has a secret is to know half the secret itself.
-
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.
-
Your honors here may serve you for a time, as it were for an hour, but they will be of no use to you beyond this world. Nobody will have heard a word of your honors in the other life. Your glory, your shame, your ambitions, and all the treasures for which you push hard and sacrifice much will be like wreaths of smoke. For these things, which you mostly seek, and for which you spend your life only tarry with you while you are on this side of the flood.
-
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.
-
Badgered, snubbed and scolded on the one hand; petted, flattered and indulged on the other-it is astonishing how many children work their way up to an honest manhood in spite of parents and friends. Human nature has an element of great toughness in it.
-
The prouder a man is, the more he thinks he deserves, and the more he thinks he deserves, the less he really does deserve.
-
Of all man's works of art, a cathedral is greatest. A vast and majestic tree is greater than that.
-
The ignorant classes are the dangerous classes.
-
Men of dissolute lives have little incentive to look forward to the hopes and glories of immortality. A due conception of these would be incompatible with such a life.
-
Compassion will cure more sins than condemnation.
-
He is rich or poor according to what he is, not according to what he has.
-
It is not the going out of port, but the coming in, that determines the success of a voyage.
-
Newspapers are the schoolmasters of the common people.
-
A tool is but the extension of a man's hand, and a machine is but a complex tool. And he that invents a machine augments the power of a man and the well-being of mankind.
-
He who hunts for flowers will finds flowers; and he who loves weeds will find weeds.
-
Nature is a vast repository of manly enjoyments.
-
Faith is spiritualized imagination.
-
If a man harbors any sort of fear, it percolates through all his thinking, damages his personality, makes him landlord to a ghost.
-
You cannot sift out the poor from the community. The poor are indispensable to the rich.
-
God wishes to exhaust all means of kindness before His hand takes hold on justice.
-
It takes a man to make a devil; and the fittest man for such a purpose is a snarling, waspish, red-hot, fiery creditor.
-
Our days are a kaleidoscope. Every instant a change takes place in the contents. New harmonies, new contrasts, new combinations of every sort. Nothing ever happens twice alike. The most familiar people stand each moment in some new relation to each other, to their work, to surrounding objects. The most tranquil house, with the most serene inhabitants, living upon the utmost regularity of system, is yet exemplifying infinite diversities.
-
Books are not made for furniture, but there is nothing else that so beautifully furnishes a house.
-
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.