Henry Ward Beecher Quotes
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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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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.
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He that does not know how wisely to meddle with public affairs in preaching the gospel, does not know how to preach the gospel.
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If a man harbors any sort of fear, it percolates through all his thinking, damages his personality, makes him landlord to a ghost.
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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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There is nothing which vanity does not desecrate.
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Whenever education and refinement carry us away from the common people, they are growing towards selfishness, which is the monster evil of the world. That is true cultivation which gives us sympathy with every form of human life, and enables us to work most successfully for its advancement. Refinement that carries us away from our fellow people is not God's refinement.
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Our yearnings are homesicknesses for heaven; our sighings are for God, just as children that cry themselves asleep away from home, and sob in their slumber, know not that they sob for their parents. The soul's inarticulate moanings are the affections yearning for the Infinite, and having no one to tell them what it is that ails them.
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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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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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A law is valuable not because it is law, but because there is right in it.
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Men judge of Christians by taking as fair samples those that lie rotten on the ground.
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What if the leaves were to fall a-weeping, and say, "It will be so painful for us to be pulled from our stalks, when autumn comes?" Foolish fear! Summer goes, and autumn succeeds. The glory of death is upon the leaves; and the gentlest breeze that blows takes them softly and silently from the bough, and they float slowly down, like fiery sparks, upon the moss.
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Where is human nature so weak as in the bookstore?
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God's men are better than the devil's men, and they ought to act as though they thought they were.
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Books are the true metempsychosis,--they are the symbol and presage of immortality. The dead men are scattered, and none shall find them. Behold they are here! they do but sleep.
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Genius unexerted is no more genius than a bushel of acorns is a forest of oaks.
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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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Experience is the mother of custom.
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No man is more cheated than the selfish man.
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One should go to sleep as homesick passengers do, saying, "Perhaps in the morning we shall see the shore.
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When a nation's young men are conservative, its funeral bell is already rung.
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Go on your knees before God. Bring all your idols; bring self-will, and pride, and every evil lust before Him, and give them up. Devote yourself, heart and soul, to His will; and see if you do not "know of the doctrine.
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Going out into life--that is dying. Christ is the door out of life.