Henry Beecher Quotes & Sayings

Thou, Everlasting Strength, hast set Thyself forth to bear our burdens. May we bear Thy cross, and bearing that; find there is nothing else to bear; and touching that cross, find that instead of taking away our strength, it adds thereto. Give us faith for darkness, for trouble, for sorrow, for bereavement, for disappointment; give us a faith that will abide though the earth itself should pass away
a faith for living, a faith for dying. — Henry Ward Beecher

Sorrows, as storms, bring down the clouds close to the earth; sorrows bring heaven down close; and they are instruments of cleansing and purifying. — Henry Ward Beecher

The continuance and frequent fits of anger produce in the soul a propensity to be angry; which oftentimes ends in choler, bitterness, and moronity, when the mid becomes ulcerated, peevish, and querulous, and is wounded by the least occurrence. — Henry Ward Beecher

The poor man with industry is happier than the rich man in idleness. — Henry Ward Beecher

Caution and conservatism are expected of old age; but when the young men of a nation are possessed of such a spirit, when they are afraid of the noise and strife caused by the applications of the truth, heaven save the land! Its funeral bell has already rung. — Henry Ward Beecher

A conservative young man has wound up his life before it was unreeled. We expect old men to be conservative but when a nation's young men are so, its funeral bell is already rung. — Henry Ward Beecher

All words are pegs to hang ideas on. — Henry Ward Beecher

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. — Henry Ward Beecher

The things required for prosperous labor, prosperous manufactures, and prosperous commerce are three. First, liberty; second, liberty; third, liberty. — Henry Ward Beecher

God never made anything else so beautiful as man. — Henry Ward Beecher

I can forgive, but I cannot forget, is only another way of saying, I will not forgive. Forgiveness ought to be like a cancelled note - torn in two, and burned up, so that it never can be shown against one. — Henry Ward Beecher

The test of Christian character should be that a man is a joy-bearing agent to the world. — Henry Ward Beecher

Socially we are woven into the fabric of society, where every man is like one thread in a piece of cloth. No single thread has a right to say, "I will stay here no longer," and draw out. No man has a right to make a hole in the well-woven fabric of society. — Henry Ward Beecher

God has intended the great to be great and the little to be little ... The trade unions, under the European system, destroy liberty ... I do not mean to say that a dollar a day is enough to support a workingman ... not enough to support a man and five children if he insists on smoking and drinking beer. But the man who cannot live on bread and water is not fit to live! A family may live on good bread and water in the morning, water and bread at midday, and good bread and water at night! — Henry Ward Beecher

Hold yourself responsible for a higher standard than anybody else expects of you. Never excuse yourself. Never pity yourself. Be a hard master to yourself-and be lenient to everybody else. — Henry Ward Beecher

Education is only like good culture,
it changes the size, but not the sort. — Henry Ward Beecher

That state of mind in which a man is impressed with invisible things is faith. — Henry Ward Beecher

Our sweetest experiences of affection are meant to be suggestions of that realm which is the home of the heart. — Henry Ward Beecher

The world is God's workshop for making men in. — Henry Ward Beecher

Good men are not those who now and then do a good act, but men who join one good act to another. — Henry Ward Beecher

Love is the wine of existence. When you have taken that, you have taken the most precious drop that there is in the cluster. — Henry Ward Beecher

When the old creeds are threadbare, and worn through, And all too narrow for the broadening soul, Give me the fine, firm texture of the new, Fair, beautiful and whole! — Henry Ward Beecher

Our moral faculties must be placed highest, else they can no more flourish than could a plant growing under the shade and drip of trees. — Henry Ward Beecher

A man without mirth is like wagon without springs, in which one is caused disagreeably to jolt by every pebble over which it turns. — Henry Ward Beecher

The philosophy of one century is the common sense of the next. — Henry Ward Beecher

Never be grandiloquent when you want to drive home a searching truth. Don't whip with a switch that has the leaves on, if you want it to tingle. — Henry Ward Beecher

The commerce of the world is conducted by the strong, and usually it operates against the weak. — Henry Ward Beecher

A boy is a piece of existence quite separate from all things else, and deserves separate chapters in the natural history of men. — Henry Ward Beecher

Men judge of Christians by taking as fair samples those that lie rotten on the ground. — Henry Ward Beecher

A little library, growing every year, is an honorable part of a man's history. It is a man's duty to have books. — Henry Ward Beecher

Where all of the man is what property he owns, it does not take long to annihilate him. — Henry Ward Beecher

The Church is not a gallery for the exhibition of eminent Christians, but a school for the education of imperfect ones. — Henry Ward Beecher

Unfruitful emotion is to be suspected. Feeling acts as an impulse, as a spur, as a spring, and when feelings are excited, and they put nothing forward, they are sometimes even dangerous to a man. — Henry Ward Beecher

Music cleanses the understanding;
inspires it, and lifts it into a realm
which it would not reach if it were left to itself. — Henry Ward Beecher

A man who does not know how to be angry, does not know how to be good. Now and then a man should be shaken to the core with indignation over things evil. — Henry Ward Beecher

We are never ripe till we have been made so by suffering. — Henry Ward Beecher

October is the opal month of the year. It is the month of glory, of ripeness. It is the picture-month. — Henry Ward Beecher

In the morning, we carry the world like Atlas; at noon, we stoop and bend beneath it; and at night, it crushes us flat to the ground. — Henry Ward Beecher

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

The great men of earth are the shadow men, who, having lived and died, now live again and forever through their undying thoughts. Thus living, though their footfalls are heard no more, their voices are louder than the thunder, and unceasing as the flow of tides or air. — Henry Ward Beecher

There is a great deal more correctness of thought respecting manhood in bodily things than in moral things. For men's ideas of manhood shape themselves as the tower and spire of cathedrals do, that stand broad at the bottom, but grow tapering as they rise, and end, far up, in the finest lines, and in an evanishing point. Where they touch the ground they are most, and where they reach to the heaven they are least. — Henry Ward Beecher

What we call wisdom is the result of all the wisdom of past ages. Our best institutions are like young trees growing upon the roots of the old trunks that have crumbled away. — Henry Ward Beecher

It is a higher exhibition of Christian manliness to be able to bear trouble than to get rid of it. — Henry Ward Beecher

The most efficacious secular book that ever was published in America is the newspaper. — Henry Ward Beecher

Men can make an idol of the Bible. — Henry Ward Beecher

There is an army of waiters in this world. — Henry Ward Beecher

Death is not an end. It is a new impulse. — Henry Ward Beecher

There ought to be such an atmosphere in every Christian church that a man going there and sitting two hours should take the contagion of heaven, and carry home a fire to kindle the altar whence he came. — Henry Ward Beecher

Heaven is a place of restless activity, the abode of never-tiring thought. — Henry Ward Beecher

Laughter is day, and sobriety is night; a smile is the twilight that hovers gently between both, more bewitching than either. — Henry Ward Beecher

It is a man dying with his harness on that angels love to escort upward. — Henry Ward Beecher

Men are like trees: each one must put forth the leaf that is created in him. — Henry Ward Beecher

A man that has lost moral sense is like a man in battle with both of his legs shot off: he has nothing to stand on. — Henry Ward Beecher

A cup of coffee - real coffee - home-browned, home ground, home made, that comes to you dark as a hazel-eye, but changes to a golden bronze as you temper it with cream that never cheated, but was real cream from its birth, thick, tenderly yellow, perfect! — Henry Ward Beecher

Now comes the mystery. — Henry Ward Beecher

A babe is nothing but a bundle of possibilities. — Henry Ward Beecher

All the wide world is but the husbandry of God for the development of the one fruit-man. — Henry Ward Beecher

God made every man to have power to be mightier than the events round about him; to hold by his firm will the reigns by which all things are guided. — Henry Ward Beecher

We let our blessings get mouldy, and then call them curses. — Henry Ward Beecher

Flowers have an expression of countenance as much as men or animals. Some seem to smile; some have a sad expression; some are pensive and diffident; others are plain, honest and upright, like the broad faced sunflower and the hollyhock. — Henry Ward Beecher

God asks no man whether he will accept life. That is not a choice. You must take it. The only question is how. — Henry Ward Beecher

It takes longer for man to find out man than any other creature that is made. — Henry Ward Beecher

Love is more just than justice. — Henry Ward Beecher

Every boy wants someone older than himself to whom he may go in moods of confidence and yearning. The neglect of this child's want by grown people ... is a fertile source of suffering. — Henry Ward Beecher

He who is false to present duty breaks a thread in the loom, and will find the flaw when he may have forgotten its cause. — Henry Ward Beecher

A library is not a luxury but one of the necessities of life. — Henry Ward Beecher

Human life is God's outer church. Its needs and urgencies are priests and pastors. — Henry Ward Beecher

Even a liar tells a hundred truths to one lie; he has to, to make the lie good for anything. — Henry Ward Beecher

The natural term of an apple-pie is but twelve hours. It reaches its highest state about one hour after it comes from the oven, and just before its natural heat has quite departed. But every hour afterward is a declension. And after it is one day old, it is thence-forward but the ghastly corpse of apple-pie. — Henry Ward Beecher

Once an ill can be patiently born it is robbed of its poison if not its pain. — Henry Ward Beecher

A man never has good luck who has a bad wife. — Henry Ward Beecher

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

If one asks me the meaning of our flag, I say to him: It means all that the Constitution of our people, organizing for justice, for liberty, and for happiness, meant. Our flag carries American ideas, American history and American feelings. This American flag was the safeguard of liberty. It was an ordinance of liberty by the people, for the people. That it meant, that it means, and, by the blessing of God, that it shall mean to the end of time! — Henry Ward Beecher

There can be no high civilization where there is not ample leisure. — Henry Ward Beecher

A tool is but the extension of a man's hand, and a machine is but a complex tool. And he that invents a machine augments the power of a man and the well-being of mankind. — Henry Ward Beecher

There never was a liar that had not a spot in him where he could not help admiring truth. — Henry Ward Beecher

God is a being who gives everything but punishment in over measure. — Henry Ward Beecher

Boys have their soft and gentle moods too. You would suppose by the morning racket that nothing could be more foreign to their nature than romance and vague sadness ... But boys have hours of great sinking and sadness, when kindness and fondness are peculiarly needful to them. — Henry Ward Beecher

There is a patience that cackles. There are a great many virtues that are hen-like. They are virtue, to be sure; but everybody in the neighborhood has to know about them. — Henry Ward Beecher

He that does not know how wisely to meddle with public affairs in preaching the gospel, does not know how to preach the gospel. — Henry Ward Beecher

Where human life needs most sympathy, where usually it is the most barren, there it is that Christ is more likely to be found than anywhere else. — Henry Ward Beecher

No man is more cheated than the selfish man. — Henry Ward Beecher

The sphere that is deepest, most unexplored, and most unfathomable, the wonder and glory of God's thought and hand, is our own soul! — Henry Ward Beecher

The most dangerous people are the ignorant. — Henry Ward Beecher

O Lord God, we pray that we may be inspired to nobleness of life in the least things. May we dignify all our daily life. May we set such a sacredness upon every part of our life, that nothing shall be trivial, nothing unimportant, and nothing dull, in the daily round. — Henry Ward Beecher

Flowers are sent to do God's work in unrevealed paths, and to diffuse influence by channels that we hardly suspect. — Henry Ward Beecher

We cannot have right virtue without right conditions. — Henry Ward Beecher

Life would be a perpetual flea hunt if a man were obliged to run down all the innuendoes, inveracities, and insinuations and misrepresentations which are uttered against him. — Henry Ward Beecher

Beauty may be said to be God's trademark in creation. — Henry Ward Beecher

Well married, a man is winged - ill-matched, he is shackled. — Henry Ward Beecher

Next to ingratitude the most painful thing to bear is gratitude. — Henry Ward Beecher

The diameter of each day is measured by the stretch of thought - not by the rising and setting of the sun. — Henry Ward Beecher

You have come into a hard world. I know of only one easy place in it, and that is the grave. — Henry Ward Beecher

No man can tell whether he is rich or poor by turning to his ledger. It is in the heart that makes a man rich. He is rich according to what he is, not according to what he has — Henry Ward Beecher

Mirth is God's medicine. — Henry Ward Beecher

A man without ambition is like a beautiful worm - it can creep, but it cannot fly. — Henry Ward Beecher

Give us that calm certainty of truth, that nearness to Thee, that conviction of the reality of the life to come, which we shall need to bear us through the troubles of this. — Henry Ward Beecher

A man without a vote is in this land like a man without a hand. — Henry Ward Beecher

Nothing can be more airy and beautiful than the transparent seed-globe-a fairy dome of splendid architecture. — Henry Ward Beecher

Most of the debts of Europe represent condensed drops of blood. — Henry Ward Beecher