Henry Ward Beecher Quotes
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There is no such thing as preaching patience into people, unless the sermon is so long that they have to practice it while they hear. No man can learn patience except by going out into the hurlyburly world, and taking life just as it blows. Patience is but lying to, and riding out the gale.
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Genius is a steed too fiery for the plow or the cart.
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No grace can save any man unless he helps himself.
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No man is good for anything who has not some particle of obstinacy to use upon occasion.
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The worst prison is not of stone. It is of a throbbing heart, outraged by an infamous life.
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God's sovereignty is not in His right hand; God's sovereignty is not in His intellect; God's sovereignty is in His love.
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There is not a person we employ who does not, like ourselves, desire recognition, praise, gentleness, forbearance, patience.
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We let our blessings get mouldy, and then call them curses.
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He who is false to present duty breaks a thread in the loom, and will find the flaw when he may have forgotten its cause.
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We should live and labor in our time that what came to us as a seed may go to the next generation as blossom, and what came to us as blossom, may go to them as fruit. This is what we mean by progress.
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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 are many persons of combative tendencies, who read for ammunition, and dig out of the Bible iron for balls. They read, and they find nitre and charcoal and sulphur for powder. They read, and they find cannon. They read, and they make portholes and embrasures. And if a man does not believe as they do, they look upon him as an enemy, and let fly the Bible at him to demolish him. So men turn the word of God into a vast arsenal, filled with all manner of weapons, offensive and defensive.
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It is often said it is no matter what a man believes if he is only sincere. This is true of all minor truths, and false of all truths whose nature it is to fashion a man's life. It will make no difference in a man's harvest whether he thinks turnips have more saccharine matter than potatoes--whether corn is better than wheat. But let the man sincerely believe that seed planted without ploughing is as good as with, that January is as favorable for seed sowing as April, and that cockle seed will produce as good a harvest as wheat, and will it make no difference?
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Private opinion is weak, but public opinion is almost omnipotent.
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Reading is a dissuasion from immorality. Reading stands in the place of company.
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The soul without imagination is what an observatory would be without a telescope.
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Death is the Christian's vacation morning. School is out. It is time to go home.
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When a man says that he is perfect already, there is only one of two places for him, and that is heaven or the lunatic asylum.
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There is not a heart but has its moments of longing, yearning for something better; nobler; holier than it knows now.
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Our best successes often come after our greatest disappointments.
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As plants take hold, not for the sake of staying, but only that they may climb higher, so it is with men. By every part of our nature we clasp things above us, one after another, not for the sake of remaining where we take hold, but that we may go higher.
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It is not desirable that we should live as in the constant atmosphere and presence of death; that would unfit us for life; but it is well for us, now and then, to talk with death as friend talketh with friend, and to bathe in the strange seas, and to anticipate the experiences of that land to which it will lead us. These forethinkings are meant, not to make us discontented with life, but to bring us back with more strength, and a nobler purpose in living.
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A person can no more make money suddenly and largely, and be unharmed by it, than one could suddenly grow from a child's stature to an adult's without harm.
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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.