Henry Ward Beecher Quotes

415 Sourced Quotes

I used to think the Lord's Prayer was a short prayer; but as I live longer, and see more of life, I begin to believe there is no such thing as getting through it. If a man, in praying that prayer, were to be stopped by every word until he had thoroughly prayed it, it would take him a lifetime.

Henry Ward Beecher
What place is so rugged and so homely that there is no beauty; if you only have a sensibility to beauty?

Henry Ward Beecher
A man has a right to picture God according to his need, whatever it be.

Henry Ward Beecher
Not that which men do worthily, but that which they do successfully, is what history makes haste to record.

Henry Ward Beecher
There have been many men who left behind them that which hundreds of years have not worn out. The earth has Socrates and Plato to this day. The world is richer yet by Moses and the old prophets than by the wisest statesmen. We are indebted to the past. We stand in the greatness of ages that are gone rather than in that of our own. But of how many of us shall it be said that, being dead, we yet speak?

Henry Ward Beecher
Religion would save a man; Christ would make him worth saving.

Henry Ward Beecher
Leaves die, but trees do not. They only undress.

Henry Ward Beecher
There is no man that lives who does not need to be drilled, disciplined, and developed into something higher and nobler and better than he is by nature. Life is one prolonged birth.

Henry Ward Beecher
Brethren, we are all sailing home; and by and by, when we are not thinking of it, some shadowy thing (men call it death), at midnight, will pass by, and will call us by name, and will say, "I have a message for you from home; God wants you; heaven waits for you.

Henry Ward Beecher
If there be any one whose power is in beauty, in purity, in goodness, it is a woman.

Henry Ward Beecher
Reason is a permanent blessing of God to the soul. Without it there can be no large religion.

Henry Ward Beecher
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
He that does not know how wisely to meddle with public affairs in preaching the gospel, does not know how to preach the gospel.

Henry Ward Beecher
True politeness is the spirit of benevolence showing itself in a refined way. It is the expression of good-will and kindness. It promotes both beauty in the man who possesses it, and happiness in those who are about him. It is a religious duty, and should be a part of religious training.

Henry Ward Beecher
Oftentimes great and open temptations are the most harmless because they come with banners flying and bands playing and all the munitions of war in full view, so that we know we are in the midst of enemies that mean us damage, and we get ready to meet and resist them. Our peculiar dangers are those that surprise us and work treachery in our fort.

Henry Ward Beecher
In America there is not one single element of civilization that is not made to depend, in the end, upon public opinion.

Henry Ward Beecher
Nature would be scarcely worth a puff of the empty wind if it were not that all Nature is but a temple, of which God is the brightness and the glory.

Henry Ward Beecher
When a man can look upon the simple wild-rose, and feel no pleasure, his taste has been corrupted.

Henry Ward Beecher
When there is love in the heart, there are rainbows in the eyes, which cover every black cloud with gorgeous hues.

Henry Ward Beecher
Every green thing loves to die in bright colors. The vegetable cohorts march glowing out of the year in flaming dresses, as if to leave this earth were a triumph and not a sadness. It is never nature that is sad, but only we, that dare not look back on the past, and that have not its prophecy of the future in our bosoms.

Henry Ward Beecher
People may talk about the equality of the sexes! They are not equal. The silent smile of a sensible, loving woman will vanquish ten men.

Henry Ward Beecher
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
Very few men acquire wealth in such a manner as to receive pleasure from it. Just as long as there is the enthusiasm of the chase they enjoy it; but when they begin to look around, and think of settling down, they find that that part by which joy enters is dead in them. They have spent their lives in heaping up colossal piles of treasure, which stand, at the end, like the pyramids in the desert sands, holding only the dust of kings.

Henry Ward Beecher
No man is good for anything who has not some particle of obstinacy to use upon occasion.

Henry Ward Beecher
A man ought to carry himself in the world as an orange tree would if it could walk up and down in the garden, swinging perfume from every little censer it holds up in the air.

Henry Ward Beecher
Do not be afraid because the, community teems with excitement. Silence and death are dreadful. The rush of life, the vigor of earnest men, the conflict of realities, invigorate, cleanse, and establish the truth.

Henry Ward Beecher
It is not in the nature of true greatness to be exclusive and arrogant.

Henry Ward Beecher
When a church is faithless to its duties, the real church is outside its walls, in the community.

Henry Ward Beecher
A man is a great bundle of tools. He is born into this life without the knowledge of how to use them. Education is the process of learning their use.

Henry Ward Beecher
God's men are better than the devil's men, and they ought to act as though they thought they were.

Henry Ward Beecher