Henry Ward Beecher Quotes
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You cannot play the hypocrite before God; and to obtain pardon you must cease to sin, as well as to be exercised by a spirit of repentance.
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Morality must always precede and accompany religion, and yet religion is much more than morality.
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The religion of Jesus Christ is not ascetic, nor sour, nor gloomy, nor circumscribing. It is full of sweetness in the present and in promise.
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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.
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A book is a garden; A book is an orchard; A book is a storehouse; A book is a party. It is company by the way; it is a counselor; it is a multitude of counselors.
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God asks no man whether he will accept life. That is not the choice. You must take it. The only choice is how.
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A conservative young man has wound up his life before it was unreeled. We expect old men to be conservative but when a nation's young men are so, its funeral bell is already rung.
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Death is not an end. It is a new impulse.
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A very common flower adds generosity to beauty. It gives joy to the poor, to the rude, and to the multitudes who could have no flowers were nature to charge a price for her blossoms.
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Do not give, as many rich men do, like a hen that lays her eggs ...and then cackles.
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Flowers are sent to do God's work in unrevealed paths, and to diffuse influence by channels that we hardly suspect.
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The advertisements in a newspaper are more full knowledge in respect to what is going on in a state or community than the editorial columns are.
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You have come into a hard world. I know of only one easy place in it, and that is the grave.
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The call to religion is not a call to be better than your fellows, but to be better than yourself. Religion is relative to the individual.
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To become an able and successful man in any profession, three things are necessary, nature, study and practice.
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It is not desirable that we should live as in the constant atmosphere and presence of death; that would unfit us for life; but it is well for us, now and then, to talk with death as friend talketh with friend, and to bathe in the strange seas, and to anticipate the experiences of that land to which it will lead us. These forethinkings are meant, not to make us discontented with life, but to bring us back with more strength, and a nobler purpose in living.
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The human soul is God's treasury, out of which he coins unspeakable riches.
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Self-denial does not belong to religion as characteristic of it; it belongs to human life; the lower nature must always be denied when you are trying to rise to a higher sphere.
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God never made anything else so beautiful as man.
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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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I would rather speak the truth to ten men than blandishments and lying to a million. Try it, ye who think there is nothing in it! Try what it is to speak with God behind you, to speak so as to be only the arrow in the bow which the Almighty draws.
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God is a being who gives everything but punishment in over measure.
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Do not be afraid of defeat. You are never so near victory as when you are defeated in a good cause.
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Victories that come cheap are cheap. Those only are worth having which come as the result of hard fighting.