American clergyman (1813-1887)
All true conflict should aim at peace.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
Even a liar tells a hundred truths to one lie; he has to, to make the lie good for anything.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
Forgiveness ought to be like a cancelled note, torn in two and burned up, so that it never can be shown against the man.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Life Thoughts
If every child might live the life predestined in a mother's heart, all the way from the cradle to the coffin, he would walk upon a beam of light, and shine in glory.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
Never forget what a man has said to you when he was angry. If he has charged you with anything, you had better look it up. Anger is a bow that will shoot sometimes where another feeling will not.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Life Thoughts
Next to ingratitude, the most painful thing to bear is gratitude.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
Selfishness at the expense of others' happiness is demonism.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
The plainest row of books that cloth or paper ever covered is more significant of refinement than the most elaborately carved furniture.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
There is an ugly kind of forgiveness in this world--a kind of hedgehog forgiveness, shot out like quills.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
To know that one has a secret is to know half the secret itself.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
Unless you have singing in the family and singing in the house, singing everywhere, until it becomes a habit, you never can have congregational singing; it will be the cold drops, half water, half ice, which drip in March from some cleft of rock, one drop here and another there; whereas it should be like the August shower, which comes ten million drops at once, and roars on the roof.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Life Thoughts
Adversity is the mint in which God stamps upon man his image and superscription.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
As I grow older, and come nearer to death, I look upon it more and more with complacent joy, and out of every longing I hear God say, "O thirsting, hungering one, come to me." What the other life will bring I know not, only that I shall awake in God's likeness, and see him as he is. If a child had been born and spent all his life in the Mammoth Cave, how impossible would it be for him to comprehend the upper world! His parents might tell him of its life, and light, and beauty, and its sounds of joy; they might heap the sand into mounds, and try to show him by pointing to stalactites how grass, and flowers, and trees grow out of the ground, till at length, with laborious thinking, the child would fancy he had gained a true idea of the unknown land. And yet, though he longed to behold it, when the day came that he was to go forth, it would be with regret for the familiar crystals, and the rock-hewn rooms, and the quiet that reigned therein. But when he came up, some May morning, with ten thousand birds singing in the trees, and the heavens bright, and blue, and full of sunlight, and the wind blowing softly through the young leaves, all a-glitter with dew, and the landscape stretching away green and beautiful to the horizon, with what rapture would he gaze about him, and see how poor were all the fancyings and the interpretations which were made within the cave, of the things which grew and lived without; and how would he wonder that he could have regretted to leave the silence and the dreary darkness of his old abode! So, when we emerge from this cave of earth into that land where spring growths are, and where is summer, and not that miserable travesty which we call summer here, how shall we wonder that we could have clung so fondly to this dark and barren life!
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Life Thoughts
Death is the dropping of the flower, that the fruit may swell.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
Doctrine is nothing but the skin of truth set up and stuffed.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
Faith is the realization of an invisible truth.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
Good men's prayers are carried by the angelic mail; but many men's prayers evidently go by the demoniac route. They are never so bad as after they have prayed.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
If you are idle, you are on the road to ruin; and there are few stopping places upon it. It is rather a precipice than a road.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Lectures to Young Men on Various Important Subjects
Memory can glean, but can never renew. It brings us joys faint as is the perfume of the flowers, faded and dried, of the summer that is gone.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Life Thoughts
Religion would save a man; Christ would make him worth saving.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit