Henry Ward Beecher Famous Quotes
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Christianity is simply the ideal form of manhood represented to us by Jesus Christ.
Evil men of every degree will use you, flatter you, lead you on until you are useless; then, if the virtuous do not pity you, or God compassionate, you are without a friend in the universe.
There is a patience that cackles. There are a great many virtues that are hen-like. They are virtue, to be sure; but everybody in the neighborhood has to know about them.
A man who cannot get angry is like a stream that cannot overflow, that is always turbid. Sometimes indignation is as good as a thunderstorm in summer, clearing and cooling the air.
The word of God tends to make large-minded noble-minded men.
Flowers have an expression of countenance as much as men or animals. Some seem to smile; some have a sad expression; some are pensive and diffident; others are plain, honest and upright, like the broad faced sunflower and the hollyhock.
The real man is one who always finds excuses for others, but never excuses himself.
Age and youth look upon life from the opposite ends of the telescope; it is exceedingly long,
it is exceedingly short.
If Christ is not divine, every impulse of the Christian world falls to a lower octave, and light and love and hope decline.
That energy which makes a child hard to manage is the energy which afterwards makes him a manager of life.
They who refuse education to a black man would turn the South into a vast poorhouse, and labor into a pendulum, necessity vibrating between poverty and indolence.
The art of being happy lies in the power of extracting happiness from common things.
Some men think that the globe is a sponge that God puts into their hands to squeeze for their own garden or flower-pot.
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.
Good nature is often a mere matter of health.
Do not give, as many rich men do, like a hen that lays her eggs ... and then cackles.
Everyone has conscience enough to hate; few have religion enough to love.
Most of the debts of Europe represent condensed drops of blood.
Memory can glean, but can never renew. It brings us joys faint as is the perfume of the flowers, faded and dried, of the summer that is gone.
The God of the Bible is a moral monstrosity.
Undoubtedly we render our consciences callous by evil indulgences; but we cannot entirely subdue that still, small voice.
Flowers are sent to do God's work in unrevealed paths, and to diffuse influence by channels that we hardly suspect.
The best lessons a man ever learns are from his mistakes. It is not for want of schoolmasters that we are still ignorant.
God washes the eyes by tears until they can behold the invisible land where tears shall come no more. O love! O affliction! ye are the guides that show us the way through the great airy space where our loved ones walked; and, as hounds easily follow the scent before the dew be risen, so God teaches us, while yet our sorrow is wet, to follow on and find our dear ones in heaven.
God plants no yearning in the human soul that he does not intend to satisfy.
God asks no man whether he will accept life. That is not a choice. You must take it. The only question is how.
Now, men think, with regard to their conduct, that, if they were to lift themselves up gigantically and commit some crashing sin, they should never be able to hold up their heads; but they will harbor in their souls little sins, which are piercing and eating them away to inevitable ruin.
A woman's pity often opens the door to love.
A church debt is the devil's salary.
A traitor is good fruit to hang from the boughs of the tree of liberty.
Troubles are often the tools by which God fashions us for better things.
Children are the hands by which we take hold of heaven.
The first hour of the morning, is the rudder of the day.
People may excite in themselves a glow of compassion, not by toasting their feet at the fire, and saying: "Lord, teach me compassion," but by going and seeking an object that requires compassion.
May we be satisfied with nothing that shall not have in it something of immortality.
A Christianity which will not help those who are struggling from the bottom to the top of society, needs another Christ to die for it.
Music cleanses the understanding;
inspires it, and lifts it into a realm
which it would not reach if it were left to itself.
The one great poem of New England is her Sunday.
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.
Every man carries a menagerie in himself; and, by stirring him up all around, you will find every sort of animal represented there.
No matter how good the walls and the materials are; if the foundations are not strong, the building will not stand. By and by, in some upper room, a crack will appear; and men will say: "There is the crack; but the cause is the foundation." So if, in youth, you lay the foundation of your character wrongly, the penalty will be sure to follow. The crack may be far down in old age, but somewhere it will certainly appear.
Faith is a recognition of those things which are above the senses.
No man ever learned to love God with all his heart, and his neighbour as himself, in a day.
Men think God is destroying them because he is tuning them. The violinist screws up the key till the tense cord sounds the concert pitch; but it is not to break it, but to use it tunefully, that he stretches the string upon the musical rack.
A little library, growing every year, is an honorable part of a man's history. It is a man's duty to have books.
A republican government is in a hundred points weaker than one that is autocratic; but in this one point it is the strongest that ever existed-it has educated a race of men that are men.
The philosophy of one century is the common sense of the next.
Make men large and strong and tyranny will bankrupt itself in making shackles for them.
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.
Next to victory, there is nothing so sweet as defeat, if only the right adversary overcomes you.
Gambling with cards or dice or stocks is all one thing. It's getting money without giving an equivalent for it.
Refinement that carries us away from our fellow-men is not God's refinement.
Only have enough of little virtues and common fidelities, and you need not mourn because you are neither a hero nor a saint.
Of all the music that reached farthest into heaven, it is the beating of a loving heart
The common schools are the stomachs of the country in which all people that come to us are assimilated within a generation. When a lion eats an ox, the lion does not become an ox but the ox becomes a lion.
A reputation for good judgment, for fair dealing, for truth, and for rectitude, is itself a fortune.
Happy is the man who has that in his soul which acts upon the dejected as April airs upon violet roots. Gifts from the hand are silver and gold, but the heart gives that which neither silver nor gold can buy. To be full of goodness, full of cheerfulness, full of sympathy, full of helpful hope, causes a man to carry blessings of which he is himself as unconscious as a lamp is of its own shining. Such a one moves on human life as stars move on dark seas to bewildered mariners; as the sun wheels, bringing all the seasons with him from the south.
Education will not come of itself; it will never come unless you seek it; it will not come unless you take the first steps which lead to it; but, taking these steps, every man can acquire it.
A week filled up with selfishness, and the Sabbath stuffed full of religious exercises, will make a good Pharisee, but a poor Christian. There are many persons who think Sunday is a sponge with which to wipe out the sins of the week. Now, God's altar stands from Sunday to Sunday, and the seventh day is no more for religion than any other. It is for rest. The whole seven are for religion, and one of them for rest.
A man has no more religion than he acts out in his life.
Whoever makes home seem to the young dearer and more happy, is a public benefactor.
A dull ax never loves grindstones.
A man has a right to picture God according to his need, whatever it be.
To do good work a man should no doubt be industrious. To do great work he must certainly be idle a well.
The hunger of the eye is not to be despised; and they are to be pitied who have starvation of the eye.
Before men we stand as opaque bee-hives. They can see the thoughts go in and out of us; but what work they do inside of a man they cannot tell. Before God we are as glass bee-hives, and all that our thoughts are doing within us he perfectly sees and understands.
Every man should be born again on the first day of January. Start with a fresh page. Take up one hole more in the buckle if necessary, or let down one, according to circumstances; but on the first of January let every man gird himself once more, with his face to the front, and take no interest in the things that were and are past.
It is trial that proves one thing weak and another strong. A house built on the sand is in fair weather just as good as if builded on a rock. A cobweb is as good as the mightiest cable when there is no strain upon it.
The difference between perseverance and obstinacy is, that one often comes from a strong will, and the other from a strong won't.
It takes longer for man to find out man than any other creature that is made.
Every tomorrow has two handles. We can take hold of it with the handle of anxiety or the handle of faith.
Going out into life
that is dying. Christ is the door out of life.
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.
Repentance is the turning of the soul from the way of midnight to the point of the coming sun.
We need not fear shipwreck when God is the pilot.
There is nothing that is so wonderfully created as the human soul. There is something of God in it. We are infinite in the future, though we are finite in the past.
Many yet are the secret truths of God which will be unfolded as they are needed.
Hope is sweet-minded and sweet-eyed. It draws pictures; it weaves fancies; it fills the future with delight.
A babe is a mother's anchor.
Reading is a dissuasion from immorality. Reading stands in the place of company.
Never forget what a man has said to you when he was angry. If he has charged you with anything, you had better look it up.
The real democratic American idea is, not that every man shall be on a level with every other man, but that every man shall have liberty to be what God made him, without hindrance.
I read for three things; first, to know what the world has done the last twenty-four hours, and is about to do today; second, for the knowledge that I specially want in my work; and third, for what will bring my mind into a proper mood.
There can be no barrenness in full summer. The very sand will yield something. Rocks will have mosses, and every rift will have its wind-flower, and every crevice a leaf; while from the fertile soil will be reared a gorgeous troop of growths, that will carry their life in ten thousand forms, but all with praise to God. And so it is when the soul knows its summer. Love redeems its weakness, clothes its barrenness, enriches its poverty, and makes its very desert to bud and blossom as the rose.
It's easier to go down a hill than up it but the view is much better at the top.
We have the promises of God as thick as daisies in summer meadows, that death, which men most fear, shall be to us the most blessed of experiences, if we trust in him. Death is unclasping; joy, breaking out in the desert; the heart, come to its blossoming time! Do we call it dying when the bud bursts into flower?
May we feel after Thee; still calling out in the darkness, as children waking in the night call "Father," so may we call out for God; and, at times, even if we do not hear Thy voice, may there be the form of a hand resting upon us, and that shall be enough; for we shall take hold of it, though it be in the dark, and it shall guide us to the growing light; for the day shall come, and the release and triumph.
God has made sleep to be a sponge by which to rub out fatigue. A man's roots are planted in night as in a soil.
God's men are better than the devil's men, and they ought to act as though they thought they were.
God does not refuse to make himself known to man. He only will not do it by the symbolism of matter. He comes to us at once by the most natural course. We are in a transient state; our bodies are accidental, and God comes to us by that which is higher and truer
the intuitions of the soul.
Mirthfulness is in the mind, and you cannot get it out. It is the blessed spirit that God has set in the mind to dust it, to enliven its dark places, and to drive asceticism, like a foul fiend, out at the back door. It is just as good, in its place, as conscience or veneration. Praying can no more be made a substitute for smiling than smiling can for praying.
Life is a plant that grows out of death.
Socially we are woven into the fabric of society, where every man is like one thread in a piece of cloth. No single thread has a right to say, "I will stay here no longer," and draw out. No man has a right to make a hole in the well-woven fabric of society.
Every boy wants someone older than himself to whom he may go in moods of confidence and yearning. The neglect of this child's want by grown people ... is a fertile source of suffering.
It was the German schoolhouse which destroyed Napoleon III. France, since then, is making monster cannon and drilling soldiers still, but she is also building schoolhouses. As long as war is possible, anything that makes better soldiers people want.
All words are pegs to hang ideas on.
What profusion is there in His work! When trees blossom there is not a single breastpin, but a whole bosom full of gems; and of leaves they have so many suits that they can throw them away to the winds all summer long. What unnumbered cathedrals has He reared in the forest shades, vast and grand, full of curious carvings, and haunted evermore by tremulous music; and in the heavens above, how do stars seem to have flown out of His hand faster than sparks out of a mighty forge!
The world is to be cleaned by somebody, and you are not called of God if you are ashamed to scrub.
Laws and institutions, like clocks, must occasionally be cleaned, wound up, and set to true time.
God makes the life fertile by disappointments, as he makes the ground fertile by frosts.