Henry Ward Beecher Quotes
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Rich men are to bear the infirmities of the poor. Wise men are to bear the mistakes of the ignorant. Strong men are to bear with the feeble. Cultured people are to bear with the rude and vulgar. If a rough and coarse man meets an ecstatically fine man, the man that is highest up is to be the servant of the man that is lowest down.
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Defeat is a school in which truth always grows strong.
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No matter what looms ahead, if you can eat today, enjoy the sunlight today, mix good cheer with friends today, enjoy it and bless God for it. Do not look back on happiness -- or dream of it in the future. You are only sure of today; do not let yourself be cheated out of it.
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If one, then, asks me the meaning of our flag, I say to him, It means just what Concord and Lexington meant, what Bunker Hill meant; it means the whole glorious Revolutionary War, which was, in short, the rising up of a valiant young people against an old tyranny, to establish the most momentous doctrine that the world had ever known - the right of men to their own selves and to their liberties.
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That energy which makes a child hard to manage is the energy which afterwards makes him a manager of life.
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There is a power in the human mind ... to see things as they are ... but there is equally a power to see things as they might be.
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Interest works night and day in fair weather and in foul. It gnaws at a man's substance with invisible teeth.
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There are many troubles which you cannot cure by the Bible and the hymn-book, but which you can cure by a good perspiration and a breath of fresh air.
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Only have enough of little virtues and common fidelities, and you need not mourn because you are neither a hero nor a saint.
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A man without ambition is worse than dough that has no yeast in it to raise it.
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Even a liar tells a hundred truths to one lie; he has to, to make the lie good for anything.
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A mother is as different from anything else that God ever thought of, as can possibly be. She is a distinct and individual creation.
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Like a bird she seems to wear gay plumage unconsciously, as if it grew upon her.
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It is one of the severest tests of friendship to tell your friend his faults. So to love a man that you cannot bear to see a stain upon him, and to speak painful truth through loving words, that is friendship.
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Take from the Bible the Godship of Christ, and it would be but a heap of dust.
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Sink the Bible to the bottom of the ocean, and man's obligations to God would be unchanged. He would have the same path to tread, only his lamp and his guide would be gone; he would have the same voyage to make, but his chart and compass would be overboard!
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The strength of a man consists in finding out the way God is going, and going that way.
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There is an ugly kind of forgiveness in this world,--a kind of hedgehog forgiveness, shot out like quills. Men take one who has offended, and set him down before the blowpipe of their indignation, and scorch him, and burn his fault into him; and when they have kneaded him sufficiently with their fiery fists, then--they forgive him.
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They who refuse education to a black man would turn the South into a vast poorhouse, and labor into a pendulum, necessity vibrating between poverty and indolence.
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Men will let you abuse them if only you will make them laugh.
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Laughter is day, and sobriety is night; a smile is the twilight that hovers gently between both, more bewitching than either.
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All men are tempted. There is no man that lives that can't be broken down, provided it is the right temptation, put in the right spot.
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The real democratic American idea is, not that every man shall be on a level with every other man, but that every man shall have liberty to be what God made him, without hindrance.
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No man can tell if he is rich or poor by turning to his ledger. It is the heart that makes a man rich. He is rich according to what he is, not according to what he has.