Henry Ward Beecher Quotes
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Riches are not an end of life, but an instrument of life.
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The prouder a man is, the more he thinks he deserves, and the more he thinks he deserves, the less he really does deserve.
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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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Fear is the soul's signal for rallying.
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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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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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Men judge of Christians by taking as fair samples those that lie rotten on the ground.
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Nobody ever sees truth except in fragments.
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If a man cannot be a Christian in the place where he is, he cannot be a Christian anywhere.
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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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Genius unexerted is no more genius than a bushel of acorns is a forest of oaks.
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Affliction comes to us all, not to make us sad, but sober; not to make us sorry, but to make us wise; not to make us despondent, but by its darkness to refresh us as the night refreshes the day; not to impoverish, but to enrich us
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Death is not an end. It is a new impulse.
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A mother's prayers, silent and gentle, can never miss the road to the throne of all bounty.
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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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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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A man's religion is himself. If he is right-minded toward God, he is religious; if the Lord Jesus Christ is his schoolmaster, then he is Christianly religious.
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There can be no barrenness in full summer. The very sand will yield something. Rocks will have mosses, and every rift will have its wind-flower, and every crevice a leaf; while from the fertile soil will be reared a gorgeous troop of growths, that will carry their life in ten thousand forms, but all with praise to God. And so it is when the soul knows its summer. Love redeems its weakness, clothes its barrenness, enriches its poverty, and makes its very desert to bud and blossom as the rose.
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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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It was the German schoolhouse which destroyed Napoleon III. France, since then, is making monster cannon and drilling soldiers still, but she is also building schoolhouses. As long as war is possible, anything that makes better soldiers people want.
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Tears are often the telescope by which men see far into heaven.
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Every man should keep a fair-sized cemetery in which to bury the faults of his friends.
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A world without a Sabbath would be like a man without a smile, like summer without flowers, and like a homestead without a garden. It is the most joyous day of the week.
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Never be grandiloquent when you want to drive home a searching truth. Don't whip with a switch that has the leaves on, if you want it to tingle.