HENRY WARD BEECHER QUOTES VII

American clergyman (1813-1887)

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

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit


We need not fear shipwreck when God is the pilot.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit


Wherever you have seen God pass, mark that spot, and go and sit in that window again.

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


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


Truth is the bread of a noble manhood.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit


A lie always needs a truth for a handle to it, else the hand would cut itself which sought to drive it home upon another. The worst lies, therefore, are those whose blade is false, but whose handle is true.

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


As the imagination is set to look into the invisible and immaterial, it seems to attract something of their vitality; and though it can give nothing to the body to redeem it from years, it can give to the soul that freshness of youth in old age which is even more beautiful than youth in the young.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Life Thoughts


It is often said it is no matter what a man believes if he is only sincere. This is true of all minor truths, and false of all truths whose nature it is to fashion a man's life. It will make no difference in a man's harvest whether he thinks turnips have more saccharine matter than potatoes--whether corn is better than wheat. But let the man sincerely believe that seed planted without ploughing is as good as with, that January is as favorable for seed sowing as April, and that cockle seed will produce as good a harvest as wheat, and will it make no difference?

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Life Thoughts


Men who neglect Christ, and try to win heaven through moralities, are like sailors at sea in a storm, who pull, some at the bowsprit and some at the mainmast, but never touch the helm.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Life Thoughts


Repentance is the turning of the soul from the way of midnight to the point of the coming sun.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Life Thoughts


Riches are not an end of life but an instrument of life.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit


The beginning is the promise of the end.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Life Thoughts


The divine qualities of man are but the slightest hints, the faintest intimations, of the attributes of God.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit


The law is a batter, which protects all that is behind it, but sweeps with destruction all that is outside.

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


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

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Life Thoughts


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

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit


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