American clergyman (1813-1887)
When a nation's young men are conservative, its funeral-bell is already rung.
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
This world is magnificent for strangers and pilgrims, but miserable for residents.
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
The way to begin a Christian life is not to study theology. Piety before theology. Right living will produce right thinking. Yet many men, when their consciences are aroused, run for catechisms, and commentaries, and systems. They do not mean to be shallow Christians. They intend to be thorough, if they enter upon the Christian life at all. Now, theologies are well in their place; but repentance and love must come before all other experiences. First a cure for your sin-sick soul, and then theologies. Suppose a man were taken with the cholera, and, instead of sending for a physician, he should send to a bookstore, and buy all the books which have been written on the human system, and, while the disease was working in his vitals, he should say, "I'll not put myself in the hands of any of these doctors. I shall probe this thing to the bottom." Would it not be better for him first to be cured of the cholera?
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Life Thoughts
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
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
Faith means a sanctified imagination, or the imagination applied to spiritual things.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
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
Our earthly loves are but so many silver steps leading us up to the great golden love of God.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
He is rich or poor according to what he is, not according to what he has.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
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
Let every man come to God in his own way.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Life Thoughts
When a man says that he is perfect already, there is only one of two places for him, and that is heaven or the lunatic asylum.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
There is not on earth so base a knave as the man who wins the love of a woman when he knows that he cannot or ought not to requite it.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
There is no greater crime than to stand between a man and his development; to take any law or institution and put it around him like a collar, and fasten it there, so that as he grows and enlarges, he presses against it till he suffocates and dies.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Life Thoughts
A woman's pity often opens the door to love.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
That man is a Christian whose soul has learned to love; and he who has not learned to love, does not know the alphabet of Christianity.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
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
Make men large and strong, and tyranny will bankrupt itself in making shackles for them.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit