Henry Ward Beecher Quotes
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Reason can tell how love affects us, but cannot tell what love is.
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A lie always needs a truth for a handle to it.
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Genius is a steed too fiery for the plow or the cart.
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Reading is a dissuasion from immorality. Reading stands in the place of company.
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All things in the natural world symbolize God, yet none of them speak of Him but in broken and imperfect words.
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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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The worst prison is not of stone. It is of a throbbing heart, outraged by an infamous life.
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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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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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Private opinion is weak, but public opinion is almost omnipotent.
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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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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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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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The soul without imagination is what an observatory would be without a telescope.
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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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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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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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Make men large and strong and tyranny will bankrupt itself in making shackles for them.
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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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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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We need not fear shipwreck when God is the pilot.
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It is not work that kills men; it is worry. Work is healthy; you can hard put more upon a man than he can bear. Worry is rust upon the blade. It is not the revolution that destroys the machinery, but the friction.
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Hope is sweet-minded and sweet-eyed. It draws pictures; it weaves fancies; it fills the future with delight.