American clergyman (1813-1887)
God does not refuse to make himself known to man. He only will not do it by the symbolism of matter. He comes to us at once by the most natural course. We are in a transient state; our bodies are accidental, and God comes to us by that which is higher and truer--the intuitions of the soul.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Life Thoughts
Well-married, a man is winged--ill-matched, he is shackled.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
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
Our life is in the loom; it rolls up and is hidden as fast as it is woven. It is to be taken out of the loom only when we leave this world; then only shall we see the pattern.
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
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
God is himself a vast medicine for man. It is the heart of God that carries restoration, inspiration, aspiration, and final victory.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
A lie always needs a truth for a handle to it, else the hand would cut itself which sought to drive it home upon another. The worst lies, therefore, are those whose blade is false, but whose handle is true.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Life Thoughts
It is not well for a man to pray cream, and live skim milk.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Life Thoughts
Laws are not masters but servants, and he rules them who obeys them.
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
Some plants of the bitterest root have the whitest and sweetest blossoms; so the bitterest wrong has the sweetest repentance.
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
God designed men to grow as trees grow in open pastures, full-boughed all around; but men in society grow like trees in forests, tall and spindling, the lower ones overshadowed by the higher, with only a little branching, and that at the top. They borrow of each other the power to stand; and if the forest be cleared, and one be left alone, the first wind which comes uproots it.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Life Thoughts
There are some Christians whose secular life is an arid, worldly strife, and whose religion is but a turbid sentimentalism. Their life runs along that line where the overflow of the Nile meets the desert. It is the boundary line between sand and mud.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Life Thoughts
The soul is often hungrier than the body, and no shops can sell it food.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
There is no right more universal and more sacred, because lying so near the root of existence, than the right of men to their own labor.
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
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
Sorrows bring us closer to God than joys.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit