Henry Ward Beecher Quotes
When a man has no longer any conception of excellence above his own, his voyage is done, he is dead,--dead in trespasses and sin of blear-eyed vanity.
What place is so rugged and so homely that there is no beauty; if you only have a sensibility to beauty?
Flowers . . . have a mysterious and subtle influence upon the feelings, not unlike some strains of music. They relax the tenseness of the mind. They dissolve its rigor.
The elms of New England! They are as much a part of her beauty as the columns of the Parthenon were the glory of its architecture.
There is a temperate zone in the mind, between luxurious indolence and exacting work; and it is to this region, just between laziness and labor, that summer reading belongs.
The rarest feeling that ever lights a human face is the contentment of a loving soul.
The most efficacious secular book that ever was published in America is the newspaper.
Law represents the effort of man to organize society; governments, the efforts of selfishness to overthrow liberty.
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.
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.
In engineering, that only is great which achieves. It matters not what the intention is, he who in the day of battle is not victorious is not saved by his intention.
Temptations are enemies outside the castle seeking entrance. If there be no false retainer within who holds treacherous parley, there can scarcely be even an offer.
A coat that is not used, the moths eat; and a Christian who is hung up so that he shall not be tempted-the moths eat him; and they have poor food at that.
Mirthfulness is in the mind and you cannot get it out. It is just as good in its place as conscience or veneration.
Interest works night and day in fair weather and in foul. It gnaws at a man's substance with invisible teeth.
The diameter of each day is measured by the stretch of thought - not by the rising and setting of the sun.
Intelligence increases mere physical ability one half. The use of the head abridges the labor of the hands.
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.
You never know till you try to reach them how accessible men are; but you must approach each man by the right door.
When God thought of mother, He must have laughed with satisfaction, and framed it quickly - so rich, so deep, so divine, so full of soul, power, and beauty, was the conception.
Home should be an oratorio of the memory, singing to all our after life melodies and harmonies of old-remembered joy.
It usually takes a hundred years to make a law, and then, after it has done its work; it usually takes a hundred years to get rid of it.
What if you have seen it before, ten thousand times over? An apple tree in full blossom is like a message, sent fresh from heaven to earth, of purity and beauty.
No town can fail of beauty, though its walks were gutters and its houses hovels, if venerable trees make magnificent colonnades along its streets.
We are apt to believe in Providence so long as we have our own way; but if things go awry, then we think, if there is a God, he is in heaven, and not on earth.
That energy which makes a child hard to manage is the energy which afterwards makes him a manager of life.
Let the GRATEFUL HEART sweep through the day that it may recognize in every hour some sweet blessing.
God puts the excess of hope in one man, in order that it may be a medicine to the man who is despondent.
All the wide world is but the husbandry of God for the development of the one fruit-man.