HENRY WARD BEECHER QUOTES VI

American clergyman (1813-1887)

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


Fear secretes acids.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Life Thoughts


There is no servant like God. No other being so humbles himself, and so bows down under weakness, and so lifts up with his strength, as God in the plenary service of Love.

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


Public sentiment is to public officers what water is to the wheel of the mill.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit


There are not anywhere else so many ways of trickery, so many false lights, so many veils, so many guises, so many illusive deceits, as are practiced in every man's conscience in respect to his motives, thoughts, feelings, conduct, and character.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit


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


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


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


It is not the going out of port, but the coming in, that determines the success of a voyage.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit


Men who act under dishonest passions are like men riding fierce horses: they cannot stop when they will, and they ride to ruin.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit


Nobody ever sees truth except in fragments.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit


Some critics, and for that matter most of them, I fear, rejoice in faults as buzzards do in carrion, to feed upon it; but a true critic is a surgeon, who cuts away the wen, or imposthume, that he may rejoice in the cleanness of a body restored to health.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit


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

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


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


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

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit


Words are but the bannerets of a great army, a few bits of waving color here and there; thoughts are the main body of the footman that march unseen below.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit


A man never has good luck who has a bad wife.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Twelve Lectures to Young Men


An ambition which has conscience in it will always be a laborious and faithful engineer, and will build the road, and bridge the chasms between itself and eminent success by the most faithful and minute performances of duty.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Life Thoughts