Henry Ward Beecher Quotes
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Perverted pride is a great misfortune in men; but pride in its original function, for which God created it, is indispensable to a proper manhood.
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Some people are so dry that you might soak them in a joke for a month and it would not get through their skins.
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It takes longer for man to find out man than any other creature that is made.
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Trouble teaches men how much there is in manhood.
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Each book has a secret history of ways and means.
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Let parents who hate their offspring rear them to hate labor, and to inherit riches; and before long they will be stung by every vice, racked by its poison, and damned by its penalty.
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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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While a man is stringing a harp, he tries the strings, not for music, but for construction. When it is finished it shall be played for melodies. God is fashioning the human heart for future joy. He only sounds a string here and there to see how far His work has progressed.
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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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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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As ships meet at sea a moment together, when words of greeting must be spoken, and then away upon the deep, so men meet in this world; and I think we should cross no man's path without hailing him, and if he needs giving him supplies.
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Ambition is the way in which a vulgar man aspires.
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The greatest architect and the one most needed is hope.
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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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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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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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The art of being happy lies in the power of extracting happiness from common things.
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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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The church is no more religion than the masonry of the aqueduct is the water that flows through it.
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Not thine the sorrow, but ours, sainted soul! Thou hast indeed entered into the promised land, while we are yet on the march. To us remain the rocking of the deep, the storm upon the land, days of duty and nights of watching; but thou are sphered high above all darkness and fear, beyond all sorrow and weariness. Rest, oh, weary heart!
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There is no such thing as white lies; a lie is as black as a coalpit, and twice as foul.
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God makes the life fertile by disappointments, as he makes the ground fertile by frosts.
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God never made anything else so beautiful as man.
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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.