Henry Ward Beecher Quotes
-
The human soul is God's treasury, out of which he coins unspeakable riches.
-
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.
-
Death? Translated into the heavenly tongue, that word means life!
-
Next to victory, there is nothing so sweet as defeat, if only the right adversary overcomes you.
-
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.
-
Many people are afraid to embrace religion, for fear they shall not succeed in maintaining it.
-
A man has no more religion than he acts out in his life.
-
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.
-
Thinking cannot be clear until it has had expression-we must write, or speak, or act our thoughts, or they will remain in half torpid form. Our feelings must have expression, or they will be as clouds, which, till they descend in rain, will never bring up fruit or flowers. So it is with all the inward feelings; expression gives them development-thought is the blossom; language is the opening bud; action the fruit behind it.
-
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.
-
Brethren, we are all sailing home; and by and by, when we are not thinking of it, some shadowy thing (men call it death), at midnight, will pass by, and will call us by name, and will say, "I have a message for you from home; God wants you; heaven waits for you.
-
A man without ambition is worse than dough that has no yeast in it to raise it.
-
Laughter is day, and sobriety is night; a smile is the twilight that hovers gently between both, more bewitching than either.
-
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.
-
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.
-
The dog was created specially for children. He is a god of frolic.
-
I used to think the Lord's Prayer was a short prayer; but as I live longer, and see more of life, I begin to believe there is no such thing as getting through it. If a man, in praying that prayer, were to be stopped by every word until he had thoroughly prayed it, it would take him a lifetime.
-
It is not in the nature of true greatness to be exclusive and arrogant.
-
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.
-
Like a bird she seems to wear gay plumage unconsciously, as if it grew upon her.
-
All the wide world is but the husbandry of God for the development of the one fruit-man.
-
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.
-
We go to the grave of a friend saying, "A man is dead," but angels throng about him saying, "A man is born."
-
Faith is a recognition of those things which are above the senses.