HENRY WARD BEECHER QUOTES V

American clergyman (1813-1887)

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


Indifference in religion is more fatal than skepticism. There is no pulse in indifference; skepticism may have warm blood.

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


Character, like porcelain-ware, must be painted before it is glazed. There can be no change of color after it is burned in.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit


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


Private opinion is weak, but public opinion is almost omnipotent.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Life Thoughts


There are men who, supposing Providence to have an implacable spite against them, bemoan in the poverty of a wretched old age, the misfortunes of their lives. Luck forever ran against them, and for others; one, with a good profession, lost his luck in the river, where he idled away his time a-fishing, when he should have been in the office; another, with a good trade, perpetually burnt up his luck by his hot temper, which provoked all his employers to leave him; another, with a lucrative business, lost his luck by amazing diligence to everything but his business; and another, who steadily followed his trade, as steadily followed his bottle.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Twelve Lectures to Young Men


Do not give, as many rich men do, like a hen that lays her egg and then cackles.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit


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

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


Spreading Christianity abroad is sometimes an excuse for not having it at home.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Life Thoughts


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


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

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit


The mind has no kitchen to do its dirty work in while the parlor remains clean.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit


Nobody ever sees truth except in fragments.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit


There are multitudes of persons whose idea of liberty is the right to do what they please, instead of the right of doing that which is lawful and best.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit


Men are not put into this world to be everlastingly played on by the harping fingers of joy.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit


As long as society is absolutely divided as milk is, the cream being at the top and the impoverished milk at the bottom, so long will society be unbalanced, and liable to be thrown into convulsions out of which will spring wars. A circulation throughout keeps it in health.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit


It takes a man to make a devil.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit


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

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Life Thoughts