Henry Ward Beecher Quotes
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John Wesley quaintly observed that the road to heaven is a narrow path, not intended for wheels, and that to ride in a coach here and to go to heaven hereafter, was a happiness too much for man.
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God makes the life fertile by disappointments, as he makes the ground fertile by frosts.
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Mountains of gold would not seduce some men, yet flattery would break them down.
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Laws and institutions, like clocks, must occasionally be cleaned, wound up, and set to true time.
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Reason can tell how love affects us, but cannot tell what love is.
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Some men are like pyramids, which are very broad where they touch the ground, but grow narrow as they reach the sky.
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When a man sells eleven ounces for twelve, he makes a compact with the devil, and sells himself for the value of an ounce.
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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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An oyster, that marvel of delicacy, that concentration of sapid excellence, that mouthful bwefore all other mouthfuls, who first had faith to believe it, and courage to execute? The exterior is not persuasive.
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Some of God's noblest sons, I think, will be selected from those that know how to take wealth, with all its temptations, and maintain godliness therewith. It is hard to be a saint standing in a golden niche.
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Nature holds an immense uncollected debt over every man's head.
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Some people are so dry that you might soak them in a joke for a month and it would not get through their skins.
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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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Flowers are the sweetest things God ever made and forgot to put a soul into.
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Nowhere on the globe do men live so well as in America, or grumble so much.
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Self-contemplation is apt to end in self-conceit.
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We sleep, but the loom of life never stops, and the pattern which was weaving when the sun went down is weaving when it comes up in the morning.
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What we call wisdom is the result of all the wisdom of past ages. Our best institutions are like young trees growing upon the roots of the old trunks that have crumbled away.
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Christ is risen! There is life, therefore, after death! His resurrection is the symbol and pledge of universal resurrection!
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Laugh at your friends, And if your friends are sore; So much the better, You may laugh the more.
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There is no faculty of the human soul so persistent and universal as that of hatred.
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Many men are mere warehouses full of merchandise--the head, the heart, are stuffed with goods. . . . There are apartments in their souls which were once tenanted by taste, and love, and joy, and worship, but they are all deserted now, and the rooms are filled with earthy and material things.
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If a man can have only one kind of sense, let him have common sense. If he has that and uncommon sense too, he is not far from genius.
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Sharp men, like sharp needles, break easy, though they pierce quick.