Henry Ward Beecher Quotes

415 Sourced Quotes

Some people are so dry that you might soak them in a joke for a month and it would not get through their skins.

Henry Ward Beecher
No one thing does human life more need than a kind consideration of the faults of others. Every one sins; everyone needs forbearance. Our own imperfections should teach us to be merciful.

Henry Ward Beecher
When flowers are full of heaven-descended dews, they always hang their heads; but men hold theirs the higher the more they receive, getting proud as they get full.

Henry Ward Beecher
A cup of coffee - real coffee - home-browned, home ground, home made, that comes to you dark as a hazel-eye, but changes to a golden bronze as you temper it with cream that never cheated, but was real cream from its birth, thick, tenderly yellow, perfect!

Henry Ward Beecher
Man is that name of power which rises above them all, and gives to every one the right to be that which God meant he should be.

Henry Ward Beecher
When a man has no longer any conception of excellence above his own, his voyage is done, he is dead,--dead in trespasses and sin of blear-eyed vanity.

Henry Ward Beecher
No man ever learned to love God with all his heart, and his neighbour as himself, in a day.

Henry Ward Beecher
Some men are, in regard to ridicule, like tin-roofed buildings in regard to hail: all that hits them bounds rattling off; not a stone goes through.

Henry Ward Beecher
There is tonic in the things that men do not love to hear. Free speech is to a great people what the winds are to oceans... and where free speech is stopped miasma is bred, and death comes fast.

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

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

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
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
It is a higher exhibition of Christian manliness to be able to bear trouble than to get rid of it.

Henry Ward Beecher
The soul is a temple; and God is silently building it by night and by day. Precious thoughts are building it; disinterested love is building it; all-penetrating faith is building it.

Henry Ward Beecher
Spreading Christianity abroad is sometimes an excuse for not having it at home.

Henry Ward Beecher
If a plant be uncouth, it has no attractions to us simply because it has been brought from the ends of the earth and is a "great rarity;" if it has beauty, it is none the less, but a great deal more attractive to us, because it is common.

Henry Ward Beecher
There are some men's souls that are so thin, so almost destitute of what is the true idea of soul, that were not the guardian angels so keen-sighted, they would altogether overlook them.

Henry Ward Beecher
If every child might live the life predestined in a mother's heart, all the way from the cradle to the coffin, he would walk upon a beam of light, and shine in glory.

Henry Ward Beecher
I will not say it is not Christian to make beads of others faults, and tell them over every day; I say it is infernal. If you want to know how the Devil feels, you do know, if you are such an one.

Henry Ward Beecher
Death is the Christian's vacation morning. School is out. It is time to go home.

Henry Ward Beecher
A gamester, as such, is the cool, calculating, essential spirit of concentrated, avaricious selfishness.

Henry Ward Beecher
God is like us to this extent, that whatever in us is good is like God.

Henry Ward Beecher
Never ask a question if you can help it; and never let a thing go unknown for the lack of asking a question if you can't help it.

Henry Ward Beecher
The world is to be cleaned by somebody, and you are not called of God if you are ashamed to scrub.

Henry Ward Beecher
I would much rather fight pride than vanity, because pride has a stand-up way of fighting. You know where it is. It throws its black shadow on you, and you are not at a loss where to strike. But vanity is that delusive, that insectiferous, that multiplied feeling, and men that fight vanities are like men that fight midges and butterflies. It is easier to chase them than to hit them.

Henry Ward Beecher
Of all formal things in the world, a clipped hedge is the most formal; and of all the informal things in the world, a forest tree is the most informal.

Henry Ward Beecher
Reason can tell how love affects us, but cannot tell what love is.

Henry Ward Beecher