American clergyman (1813-1887)
Wealth held by a class and used ambitiously becomes as despotic as an absolute monarchy, and has in its hands manners, customs, laws, institutions, and governments themselves.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
Wickedness goes to great lengths and depths where it is not checked and restrained by the free and continuous expression of the indignation of good men.
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
Faith means a sanctified imagination, or the imagination applied to spiritual things.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
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
One might as well attempt to calculate mathematically the contingent forms of the tinkling bits of glass in a kaleidoscope as to look through the tube of the future and foretell its pattern.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Life Thoughts
One of the affecting features in a life of vice is the longing, wistful outlooks given by the wretches who struggle with unbridled passions, towards virtues which are no longer within their reach. Men in the tide of vice are sometimes like the poor creatures swept down the stream of mighty rivers, who see people safe on shore, and trees, and flowers, as they go quickly past; and all things that are desirable gleam upon them for a moment to heighten their trouble, and to aggravate their swift-coming destruction.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Life Thoughts
Amid the discords of this life, it is blessed to think of heaven, where God draws after him an everlasting train of music; for all thoughts are harmonious and all feelings vocal, and so there is round about his feet eternal melody.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Life Thoughts
Well-married, a man is winged--ill-matched, he is shackled.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
A cunning man overreaches no one half so much as himself.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Life Thoughts
Blessed be the man whose work drives him. Something must drive men; and if it is wholesome industry, they have no time for a thousand torments and temptations.
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
There is nothing that makes more cowards and feeble men than public opinion.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
There is no such thing as preaching patience into people, unless the sermon is so long that they have to practice it while they hear. No man can learn patience except by going out into the hurlyburly world, and taking life just as it blows. Patience is but lying to, and riding out the gale.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Life Thoughts
Patriotism, in our day, is made to be an argument for all public wrong, and all private meanness. For the sake of country a man is told to yield every thing that makes the land honorable. For the sake of country a man must submit to every ignominy that will lead to the ruin of the state through disgrace of the citizen. There never was a man so unpatriotic as Christ was. Old Jerusalem ought to have been everything to him. The laws and institutions of his country ought to have been more to him than all the men in his country. They were not, and the Jews hated him; but the common people, like the ocean waters, moved in tides towards his heavenly attraction wherever he went.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Life Thoughts
The poor man with industry is happier than the rich man in idleness.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
Newspapers are to the body politic what arteries are to the human body, their function being to carry blood and sustenance and repair to every part of the body.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
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
What if the leaves were to fall a-weeping, and say, "It will be so painful for us to be pulled from our stalks, when autumn comes?" Foolish fear! Summer goes, and autumn succeeds. The glory of death is upon the leaves; and the gentlest breeze that blows takes them softly and silently from the bough, and they float slowly down, like fiery sparks, upon the moss.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Life Thoughts
Our virtues are like crystals hidden in rocks. No man shall find them by any soft ways, but by the hammer and by fire.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit