HENRY WARD BEECHER QUOTES VIII

American clergyman (1813-1887)

Laws are not masters but servants, and he rules them who obeys them.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit


The worst thing in this world, next to anarchy, is government.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit


There is not on earth so base a knave as the man who wins the love of a woman when he knows that he cannot or ought not to requite it.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit


Truth is the bread of a noble manhood.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit


Little lies are very dangerous, because there are so many of them, and because each one of them scours upon the character as diamond-pointed.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit


Some plants of the bitterest root have the whitest and sweetest blossoms; so the bitterest wrong has the sweetest repentance.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit


A man that does nothing but watch evil, never will overcome it.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit


God makes the life fertile by disappointments, as he makes the ground fertile by frosts.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit


Patriotism, in our day, is made to be an argument for all public wrong, and all private meanness. For the sake of country a man is told to yield every thing that makes the land honorable. For the sake of country a man must submit to every ignominy that will lead to the ruin of the state through disgrace of the citizen. There never was a man so unpatriotic as Christ was. Old Jerusalem ought to have been everything to him. The laws and institutions of his country ought to have been more to him than all the men in his country. They were not, and the Jews hated him; but the common people, like the ocean waters, moved in tides towards his heavenly attraction wherever he went.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Life Thoughts


Men's graces must get the better of their faults as a farmer's crops do of the weeds--by growth. When the corn is low, the farmer uses the plough to root up the weeds; but when it is high, and shakes its palm-like leaves in the wind, he says, "Let the corn take care of them," for the dense shadow of growing corn is as fatal to weeds as the edge of the sickle.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Life Thoughts


I am suspicious of that church whose members are one in their beliefs and opinions. When a tree is dead, it will lie any way; alive, it will have its own growth. When men's deadness is in the church, and their life elsewhere, all will be alike. They can be cut and polished any way. When they are alive, they are like a tropical forest--some shooting up, like the mahogany tree; some spreading, like the vine; some darkling, like the shrub; some lying, herb-like, on the ground; but all obeying their own laws of growth--a common law of growth variously expressed in each--and so contributing to the richness and beauty of the wood.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Life Thoughts


One might as well attempt to calculate mathematically the contingent forms of the tinkling bits of glass in a kaleidoscope as to look through the tube of the future and foretell its pattern.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Life Thoughts


God's hand, like a sign-board, is pointing toward democracy, and saying to the nations of the earth, "This is the way: walk ye in it."

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit


He is rich or poor according to what he is, not according to what he has.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit


The call to religion is not a call to be better than your fellows, but to be better than yourself. Religion is relative to the individual.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Life Thoughts


Let every man come to God in his own way.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Life Thoughts


The beginning is the promise of the end.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Life Thoughts


It takes a man to make a devil.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit


Amid the discords of this life, it is blessed to think of heaven, where God draws after him an everlasting train of music; for all thoughts are harmonious and all feelings vocal, and so there is round about his feet eternal melody.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Life Thoughts


There is in youth a purity of character which, when once touched and defiled, can never be restored; a fringe more delicate than frost-work, and which, when torn and broken, can never be re-embroidered.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit