HENRY WARD BEECHER QUOTES V

American clergyman (1813-1887)

Beauty may be said to be God's trademark in creation.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit


When we have heartily repented of a wrong, we should let all the waves of forgetfulness roll over it, and go forward unburdened to meet the future.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit


Our life is but a new form of the way men have lived from the beginning.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Life Thoughts


The grossest, the cruelest, the most selfish, the most easily pervertible and perverted thing in this world, is government.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit


Christianity is simply the ideal form of manhood represented to us by Jesus Christ.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit


The way to begin a Christian life is not to study theology. Piety before theology. Right living will produce right thinking. Yet many men, when their consciences are aroused, run for catechisms, and commentaries, and systems. They do not mean to be shallow Christians. They intend to be thorough, if they enter upon the Christian life at all. Now, theologies are well in their place; but repentance and love must come before all other experiences. First a cure for your sin-sick soul, and then theologies. Suppose a man were taken with the cholera, and, instead of sending for a physician, he should send to a bookstore, and buy all the books which have been written on the human system, and, while the disease was working in his vitals, he should say, "I'll not put myself in the hands of any of these doctors. I shall probe this thing to the bottom." Would it not be better for him first to be cured of the cholera?

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Life Thoughts


Every thought and feeling is a painting stroke, in the darkness, of our likeness that is to be; and our whole life is but a chamber, which we are frescoing with colors that do not appear while being laid on wet, but which will shine forth afterwards, when finished and dry.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Life Thoughts


If we are like Christ, we shall seek, not to absorb, but to reflect the light which falls upon others, and thus we shall become pure and spotless.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Life Thoughts


Men go shopping just as men go out fishing or hunting, to see how large a fish may be caught with the smallest hook.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit


Every man carries a menagerie in himself; and, by stirring him up all around, you will find every sort of animal represented there.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit


God's nature is medicinal to ours. There are no troubles which befall our suffering hearts, for which there is not in God a remedy, if only we rise to receive it.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit


It is the duty of Christians to make religion lovely; he who makes religion unlovely is more an infidel than if he simply denied the doctrines of Christianity. He is a worm at the core, and not a worm on the leaf.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit


Fear secretes acids.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Life Thoughts


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.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Life Thoughts


There is no greater crime than to stand between a man and his development; to take any law or institution and put it around him like a collar, and fasten it there, so that as he grows and enlarges, he presses against it till he suffocates and dies.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Life Thoughts


A law is valuable, not because it is a law, but because there is right in it.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Life Thoughts


In America there is not one single element of civilization that is not made to depend, in the end, upon public opinion.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit


A man has no more religion than he acts out in his life.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit


We sleep, but the loom of life never stops; and the pattern which was weaving when the sun went down is weaving when it comes up tomorrow.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Life Thoughts


There is a kind of indignation excited in us when one likens our grief to his own. The soul is jealous of its experiences, and does not like pride to be humbled by the thought that they are common. For, though we know that the world groans and travails in pain, and has done so for ages, yet a groan heard by our ears is a very different thing from a groan uttered by our mouth. The sorrows of other men seem to us like clouds of rain that empty themselves in the distance, and whose long-travelling thunder comes to us mellowed and subdued; but our own troubles are like a storm bursting right overhead, and sending down its bolts upon us with direct plunge.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Life Thoughts