Henry Ward Beecher Quotes
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The slave labors, but with no cheer - it is not the road to respectability, it will honor him with no citizens' trust, it brings no bread to his family, no grain to his garner, no leisure in after-days, no books or papers to his children. It opens no school-house door, builds no church, rears for him no factory, lays no keel, fills no bank, earns no acres. With sweat and toil and ignorance he consumes his life, to pour the earnings into channels from which he does no drink, into hands that never honor him. But perpetually rob and often torment.
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Refinement that carries us away from our fellow-men is not God's refinement.
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Nowhere else can one find so miscellaneous, so various, an amount of knowledge as is contained in a good newspaper.
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Downright admonition, as a rule, is too blunt for the recipient.
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Take all the robes of all the good judges that have ever lived on the face of the earth, and they would not be large enough to cover the iniquity of one corrupt judge.
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Anger is a bow that will shoot sometimes where another feeling will not.
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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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If there's a job to be done, I always ask the busiest man in my parish to take it on and it gets done.
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We are but a point, a single comma, and God is the literature of eternity.
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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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Most of the debts of Europe represent condensed drops of blood.
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Laws and institutions, like clocks, must occasionally be cleaned, wound up, and set to true time.
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Truthfulness is godliness.
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It will not do to be saints at meeting and sinners everywhere else.
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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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Today is a goblet day. The whole heavens have been mingled with exquisite skill to a delicious flavor, and the crystal cup put to every lip. Breathing is like ethereal drinking. It is a luxury simply to exist.
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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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I never knew an early-rising, hard-working, prudent man, careful of his earnings, and strictly honest who complained of bad luck.
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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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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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To array a man's will against his sickness is the supreme art of medicine.
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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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The cynic puts all human actions into two classes - openly bad and secretly bad.
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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.