Henry Ward Beecher Quotes
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Difficulties are God's errands; and when we are sent upon them, we should esteem it a proof of God's confidence.
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There is no liberty to men who know not how to govern themselves.
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The common schools are the stomachs of the country in which all people that come to us are assimilated within a generation. When a lion eats an ox, the lion does not become an ox but the ox becomes a lion.
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And when no longer we can see Thee, may we reach out our hands, and find Thee leading us through death to immortality and glory.
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The world's battlefields have been in the heart chiefly; more heroism has been displayed in the household and the closet, than on the most memorable battlefields in history.
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In regard to the great mass of men, anything that breaks the realm of fear is not salutary, but dangerous; because it takes off one of the hoops that hold the barrel together in which the evil spirits are confined.
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The moment an ill can be patiently handled, it is disarmed of its poison, though not of its pain.
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The soul is often hungrier than the body and no shop can sell it food.
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True politeness is the spirit of benevolence showing itself in a refined way. It is the expression of good-will and kindness. It promotes both beauty in the man who possesses it, and happiness in those who are about him. It is a religious duty, and should be a part of religious training.
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Businessmen are to be pitied who do not recognize the fact that the largest side of their secular business is benevolence. ... No man ever manages a legitimate business in this life without doing indirectly far more for other men than he is trying to do for himself.
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Our sweetest experiences of affection are meant to be suggestions of that realm which is the home of the heart.
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There is no man that lives who does not need to be drilled, disciplined, and developed into something higher and nobler and better than he is by nature. Life is one prolonged birth.
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Every man carries a menagerie in himself; and, by stirring him up all around, you will find every sort of animal represented there.
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I don't like these cold, precise, perfect people, who, in order not to speak wrong, never speak at all, and in order not to do wrong, never do anything.
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Downright admonition, as a rule, is too blunt for the recipient.
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Clothes and manners do not make the man; but when he is made, they greatly improve his appearance.
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A bird in a cage is not half a bird.
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By religion I mean perfected manhood,--the quickening of the soul by the influence of the Divine Spirit.
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Mirth is God's medicine. Everybody ought to bathe in it. Grim care, moroseness, anxiety,--all this rust of life, ought to be scoured off by the oil of mirth. It is better than emery. Every man ought to rub himself with it. A man without mirth is like a wagon without springs, in which one is caused disagreeably to jolt by every pebble over which it runs.
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There is a great deal more correctness of thought respecting manhood in bodily things than in moral things. For men's ideas of manhood shape themselves as the tower and spire of cathedrals do, that stand broad at the bottom, but grow tapering as they rise, and end, far up, in the finest lines, and in an evanishing point. Where they touch the ground they are most, and where they reach to the heaven they are least.
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Conceited men often seem a harmless kind of men, who, by an overweening self-respect, relieve others from the duty of respecting them at all.
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Refinement that carries us away from our fellow-men is not God's refinement.
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October is nature's funeral month. Nature glories in death more than in life. The month of departure is more beautiful than the month of coming - October than May. Every green thin loves to die in bright colors.
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He is the happiest man who is engaged in a business which tasks the most faculties of his mind.