Henry Ward Beecher Quotes
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Downright admonition, as a rule, is too blunt for the recipient.
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We only see in a lifetime a dozen faces marked with the peace of a contented spirit.
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Nothing dies so hard, or rallies so often as intolerance.
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He is greatest whose strength carries up the most hearts by the attraction of his own.
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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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When God thought of mother, He must have laughed with satisfaction, and framed it quickly - so rich, so deep, so divine, so full of soul, power, and beauty, was the conception.
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Refinement that carries us away from our fellow-men is not God's refinement.
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To array a man's will against his sickness is the supreme art of medicine.
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Like waves, our feelings may continue by repeating themselves, by intermittent rushes; but no emotion any more than a wave can long retain its own individual form.
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I can forgive, but I cannot forget, is only another way of saying, I will not forgive. Forgiveness ought to be like a cancelled note - torn in two, and burned up, so that it never can be shown against one.
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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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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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He is the happiest man who is engaged in a business which tasks the most faculties of his mind.
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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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A dull axe never loves grindstones, but a keen workman does; and he puts his tool on them in order that it may be sharp. And men do not like grinding; but they are dull for the purposes which God designs to work out with them, and therefore He is grinding them.
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The sun does not shine for a few trees, and flowers, but for the wide world's joy. The lonely pine on the mountain-top waves its sombre boughs and cries, 'Thou art my sun.' And the little meadow violet lifts its cup of blue, and whispers with its perfumed breath, 'Thou art my sun.' And the grain in a thousand fields rustles in the wind, and makes answer, 'Thou art my sun.' So God sits effulgent in heaven, not for a favored few, but for the universe of life; and there is no creature so poor or so low that he may not look up with childish confidence and say, 'My Father, Thou art mine.
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Mirthfulness is in the mind and you cannot get it out. It is just as good in its place as conscience or veneration.
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Nowhere on the globe do men live so well as in America, or grumble so much.
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Truthfulness is godliness.
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A coat that is not used, the moths eat; and a Christian who is hung up so that he shall not be tempted-the moths eat him; and they have poor food at that.
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The commerce of the world is conducted by the strong, and usually it operates against the weak.
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Some men are, in regard to ridicule, like tin-roofed buildings in regard to hail: all that hits them bounds rattling off; not a stone goes through.
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A thoughtful mind, when it sees a Nation's flag, sees not the flag only, but the Nation itself; and whatever may be its symbols, its insignia, he reads chiefly in the flag the Government, the principles, the truths, the history which belongs to the Nation that sets it forth.
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The disciples found angels at the grave of Him they loved; and we should always find them too, but that our eyes are too full of tears for seeing.