Henry Ward Beecher Quotes

It will not do to be saints at meeting and sinners everywhere else.

The best lessons a man ever learns are from his mistakes. It is not for want of schoolmasters that we are still ignorant.

The sphere that is deepest, most unexplored, and most unfathomable, the wonder and glory of God's thought and hand, is our own soul!

Everyone has conscience enough to hate; few have religion enough to love.

Walking humbly, you are more of a man than you were when you walked proudly.

I beseech you to correct one fault - severe speech of others; never speak evil of any man, no matter what the facts may be.

Everyone has influence, for good or bad, upon others.

Leaves die, but trees do not. They only undress.

Some folks think that Christianity means a kind of insurance policy, and that it has little to do with this life, but that it is a very good thing when a man dies.

As flowers always wear their own colors and give forth their own fragrance every day alike, so should Christians maintain their character at all times and under all circumstances.

No people are so easy to govern as the intelligent, and none are so hard to govern as the ignorant.

Though a man declares himself an atheist, it in no way alters his obligations.

Every man is full of music; but it is not every man that knows how to bring it out.

Many of our troubles are God dragging us, and they would end if we would stand upon our feet and go whither He would have us go.

The things required for prosperous labor, prosperous manufactures, and prosperous commerce are three. First, liberty; second, liberty; third, liberty.

No grief has a right to immortality. That ground belongs to joy, to hope, to faith.

Nowhere on the globe do men live so well as in America, or grumble so much.

There are multitudes of persons whose idea of liberty is the right to do what they please, instead of the right of doing that which is lawful and best.

A man that is afraid is never a man.

Sorrows are gardeners: they plant flowers along waste places, and teach vines to cover barren heaps.

Indifference in religion is more fatal than skepticism. There is no pulse in indifference; skepticism may have warm blood.

Christ certainly did come to destroy the law and the prophets.

Affliction comes to us all ...not to impoverish, but to enrich us, as the plough enriches the field; to multiply our joy, as the seed, by planting, is multiplied a thousand-fold.

If Christ is the wisdom of God and the power of God in the experience of those who trust and love Him, there needs no further argument of His divinity.

To be a Christian is to obey Christ no matter how you feel.

The religion of Jesus Christ is not ascetic, nor sour, nor gloomy, nor circumscribing. It is full of sweetness in the present and in promise.

No church can be prospered in which all the ministration comes from the pulpit.

There is no harder shield for the devil to pierce with temptation than singing with prayer.

Despondency is ingratitude; hope is God's worship.

Unfruitful emotion is to be suspected. Feeling acts as an impulse, as a spur, as a spring, and when feelings are excited, and they put nothing forward, they are sometimes even dangerous to a man.

No man ever learned to love God with all his heart, and his neighbour as himself, in a day.

It is necessary, if one would read aright, that he should read at least two newspapers, representing both sides of important subjects.

Take from the Bible the Godship of Christ, and it would be but a heap of dust.

God's grace is the oil that fills the lamp of love.

The fear of doing right is the grand treason in times of danger.

Success surely comes with conscience in the long run, other things being equal. Capacity and fidelity are commercially profitable qualities.

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.

It is a very good world for the purposes for which it was built; and that is all anything is good for.

In friendship your heart is like a bell struck every time your friend is in trouble.

Love is the world's river of life

If you have only two or three things that you can enjoy and they are things which time and decay may remove from you, what are you going to do in old age?

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.

Flowers are sent to do God's work in unrevealed paths, and to diffuse influence by channels that we hardly suspect.

Think of a man in a chronic state of anger!

Human life is God's outer church. Its needs and urgencies are priests and pastors.

The mystery of history is an insoluble problem.

Experience is the mother of custom.

Self-denial does not belong to religion as characteristic of it; it belongs to human life; the lower nature must always be denied when you are trying to rise to a higher sphere.

Men of dissolute lives have little incentive to look forward to the hopes and glories of immortality. A due conception of these would be incompatible with such a life.

When our children die, we drop them into the unknown, shuddering with fear. We know that they go out from us, and we stand, and pity, and wonder.