HENRY WARD BEECHER QUOTES XVII

American clergyman (1813-1887)

Love is the medicine of all moral evil. By it the world is to be cured of sin.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit


We never know the love of our parents for us till we have become parents.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit


Birds finish the nest with their own breast, so it is the bosom that makes the home, and not the bill or the claw.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit


Men never _make_ truths; they only recognize the value of this currency of God. They find truths, as men sometimes find bills, in the street, and only recognize the value of that which other persons have drawn.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit


A man whose religion is dominated by overhanging gloom or fear misrepresents religion as much as a cloudy day would misrepresent a sunshiny day, or as much as January would misrepresent June.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit


God gives as the wheat gives: we sow one grain, and reap a hundred.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit


That is the best baptism that leaves the man cleanest inside.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit


Where human life needs most sympathy, where usually it is the most barren, there it is that Christ is more likely to be found than anywhere else.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit


No man knows what he will do till the right temptation comes.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit


Success is full of promise till men get it; and then it is a last year's nest, from which the bird has flown.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Life Thoughts


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


We have the promises of God as thick as daisies in summer meadows, that death, which men most fear, shall be to us the most blessed of experiences, if we trust in him. Death is unclasping; joy, breaking out in the desert; the heart, come to its blossoming time! Do we call it dying when the bud bursts into flower?

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


As the cream abandons the milk from which it took its life, and rises to the top and rides there, so men, because they are richer than those around about them, separate themselves, and all mankind below them they regard as skim milk.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit


Every city should make the common school so rich, so large, so ample, so beautiful in its endowments, and so fruitful in its results, that a private school will not be able to live under the drip of it.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit


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

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit


A lie always needs a truth for a handle to it. The worst lies are those whose blade is false, but whose handle is true.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit


Justice is never so slender to us as when we first practice it.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit


We are but a point, a single comma, and God is the literature of eternity.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit


The religion of Jesus Christ is not ascetic, nor sour, nor gloomy, nor circumscribing. It is full of sweetness in the present and in promise.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit