Henry Ward Beecher Quotes
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Temptations are enemies outside the castle seeking entrance. If there be no false retainer within who holds treacherous parley, there can scarcely be even an offer.
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Don't look where you fall, but where you slipped.
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Blessed be the man whose work drives him. Something must drive men; and if it is wholesome industry, they have no time for a thousand torments and temptations.
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The law is a battery, which protects all that is behind it, but sweeps with destruction all that is outside.
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Many yet are the secret truths of God which will be unfolded as they are needed.
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Our government is built upon the vote. But votes that are purchasable are quicksands, and a government built on them stands upon corruption and revolution.
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The mother's heart is the child's schoolroom.
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The way to avoid evil is not by maiming our passions, but by compelling them to yield their vigor to our moral nature.
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Life is a plant that grows out of death.
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Tyrannies are overthrown by ideas. Armies are defeated by ideas. Nations, and Time itself, are overmatched by ideas.
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A helping word to one in trouble is often like a switch on a railroad track-an inch between wreck and smooth-rolling prosperity.
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The head learns new things, but the heart forever practices old experiences.
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No one thing does human life more need than a kind consideration of the faults of others. Every one sins; everyone needs forbearance. Our own imperfections should teach us to be merciful.
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Death is the dropping of the flower, that the fruit may swell.
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Faith is spiritualized imagination.
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Music cleanses the understanding; inspires it, and lifts it into a realm which it would not reach if it were left to itself.
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God made the human body, and it is the most exquisite and wonderful organization which has come to us from the divine hand.
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Coming to the Bible through commentaries is much like looking at a landscape through garret windows, over which generations of unmolested spiders have spun their webs.
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Love is the river of life in this world. Think not that ye know it who stand at the little tinkling rill, the first small fountain. Not until you have gone through the rocky gorges, and not lost the stream; not until you nave gone through the meadow, and the stream has widened and deepened until fleets could ride on its bosom; not until beyond the meadow you have come to the unfathomable ocean, and poured your treasures into its depths – not until then can you know what love is.
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We not only live among men, but there are airy hosts, blessed spectators, sympathetic lookers-on, that see and know and appreciate our thoughts and feelings and acts.
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The mystery of history is an insoluble problem.
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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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Oftentimes great and open temptations are the most harmless because they come with banners flying and bands playing and all the munitions of war in full view, so that we know we are in the midst of enemies that mean us damage, and we get ready to meet and resist them. Our peculiar dangers are those that surprise us and work treachery in our fort.
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The gravest events dawn with no more noise than the morning star makes in rising. All great developments complete themselves in the world and modestly wait in silence, praising themselves never, and announcing themselves not at all. We must be sensitive, and sensible, if we would see the beginnings and endings of great things. That is our part.