American clergyman (1813-1887)
Christians ought not to slander God by looking as if they were at an everlasting funeral.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
Faith is the realization of an invisible truth.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
Men think religion bears the same relation to life that flowers do to trees. The tree must grow through a long period before the blossoming time; so they think religion is to be a blossom just before death, to secure heaven. But the Bible represents religion, not as the latest fruit of life, but as the whole of it--beginning, middle, and end. It is simply right living.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Life Thoughts
Liberty is the soul's right to breathe, and when it cannot take a long breath, laws are girdled too tight.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Life Thoughts
If any man is rich and powerful, he comes under that law of God by which the higher branches must take the burnings of the sun, and shade those that are lower; by which the tall trees must protect the weak plants beneath them.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Life Thoughts
Truths are first clouds, then rain, then harvests and food.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Life Thoughts
Do not be troubled because you have not great virtues. God made a million spears of grass where he made one tree. The earth is fringed and carpeted, not with forests, but with grasses. Only have enough of little virtues and common fidelities, and you need not mourn because you are neither a hero nor a saint.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Life Thoughts
Selfishness is that detestable vice which no one will forgive in others, and no one is without in himself.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Life Thoughts
As I grow older, and come nearer to death, I look upon it more and more with complacent joy, and out of every longing I hear God say, "O thirsting, hungering one, come to me." What the other life will bring I know not, only that I shall awake in God's likeness, and see him as he is. If a child had been born and spent all his life in the Mammoth Cave, how impossible would it be for him to comprehend the upper world! His parents might tell him of its life, and light, and beauty, and its sounds of joy; they might heap the sand into mounds, and try to show him by pointing to stalactites how grass, and flowers, and trees grow out of the ground, till at length, with laborious thinking, the child would fancy he had gained a true idea of the unknown land. And yet, though he longed to behold it, when the day came that he was to go forth, it would be with regret for the familiar crystals, and the rock-hewn rooms, and the quiet that reigned therein. But when he came up, some May morning, with ten thousand birds singing in the trees, and the heavens bright, and blue, and full of sunlight, and the wind blowing softly through the young leaves, all a-glitter with dew, and the landscape stretching away green and beautiful to the horizon, with what rapture would he gaze about him, and see how poor were all the fancyings and the interpretations which were made within the cave, of the things which grew and lived without; and how would he wonder that he could have regretted to leave the silence and the dreary darkness of his old abode! So, when we emerge from this cave of earth into that land where spring growths are, and where is summer, and not that miserable travesty which we call summer here, how shall we wonder that we could have clung so fondly to this dark and barren life!
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Life Thoughts
Unless you have singing in the family and singing in the house, singing everywhere, until it becomes a habit, you never can have congregational singing; it will be the cold drops, half water, half ice, which drip in March from some cleft of rock, one drop here and another there; whereas it should be like the August shower, which comes ten million drops at once, and roars on the roof.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Life Thoughts
Love ... like a lamp, it needs to be fed out of the oil of another's heart, or its flame burns low.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
Nothing in this world requires such long seasoning and ripening as new thoughts.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
Wealth in activity--capital with all its friction--is far safer than invested wealth lying dead.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
What are called "fanatics" and "extremists" are only the men that God sends to make up the general average which the unfaithfulness of others lowers.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
It makes a great deal of difference what sort of God men believe in.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
God's whole nature moves toward the man who wants to be free from sin, as broadly and irresistibly as the summer moves from the south toward the north.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
A coat that is not used, the moths eat; and a Christian who is hung up so that he shall not be tempted--the moths eat him; and they have poor food at that.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
Christians are like vases, they must pass through the fire ere they can shine. The graces which are to be their everlasting beauty and glory must be burned in.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
We go to the grave of a friend, saying, "A man is dead;" but angels throng about him, saying, "A man is born."
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Life Thoughts
Men who stand on any other foundation than the rock Christ Jesus are like birds that build in trees by the side of rivers. The bird sings in the branches, and the river sings below, but all the while the waters are undermining the soil about the roots, till, in some unsuspected hour, the tree falls with a crash into the stream; and then its nest is sunk, its home is gone, and the bird is a wanderer.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Life Thoughts