Henry Ward Beecher - Man Quotes

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There are not anywhere else so many ways of trickery, so many false lights, so many veils, so many guises, so many illusive deceits, as are practiced in every man's conscience in respect to his motives, thoughts, feelings, conduct, and character.

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

Henry Ward Beecher
Greatness lies, not in being strong, but in the right using of strength; and strength is not used rightly when it serves only to carry a man above his fellows for his own solitary glory. He is the greatest whose strength carries up the most hearts by the attraction of his own.

Henry Ward Beecher
It is one of the severest tests of friendship to tell your friend of his faults. If you are angry with a man, or hate him, it is not hard to go to him and stab him with words; but so to love a man that you cannot bear to see the stain of a sin upon him, and to speak painful truth through loving words—that is friendship.

Henry Ward Beecher
Christ is the ideal of what a man should be. He has my ideal portrait, as it were, drawn out in His own thought and feeling. There is an exaltation and a grandeur for myself in the time to come, which Christ knows, and I do not; but I am following after. I am pressing up toward that thought that Christ has of what I am and ought to be; and I am determined that I will apprehend it as Christ Himself does. Not that I have it; but I will strive for it. My manhood is in the future. My life lies beyond the present.

Henry Ward Beecher
Man is at the bottom an animal, midway a citizen, and at the top divine. But the climate of this world is such that few ripen at the top.

Henry Ward Beecher
If a boy is not trained to endure and to bear trouble, he will grow up a girl; and a boy that is a girl has all a girl's weakness without any of her regal qualities. A woman made out of a woman is God's noblest work; a woman made out of a man is His meanest.

Henry Ward Beecher
The real democratic American idea is, not that every man shall be on a level with every other man, but that every man shall have liberty to be what God made him, without hindrance.

Henry Ward Beecher
If any man is rich and powerful he comes under the 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
Happy is the man that loves flowers! Happy, even if it be a love adulterated with vanity and strife. For human passions nestle in flower-lovers too.

Henry Ward Beecher
Every man is full of music; but it is not every man that knows how to bring it out.

Henry Ward Beecher
Books are the windows through which the soul looks out. A house without books is like a room without windows. No man has a right to bring up his children without surrounding them with books, if he has the means to buy them. It is a wrong to his family. He cheats them! Children learn to read by being in the presence of books. The love of knowledge comes with reading and grows upon it.

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

Henry Ward Beecher
Astronomers have built telescopes which can show myriads of stars unseen before; but when a man looks through a tear in his own eye, that is a lens which opens reaches in the unknown, and reveals orbs which no telescope, however skilfully constructed, could do; nay, which brings to view even the throne of God, and pierces the nebulous distance where are those eternal verities in which true life consists.

Henry Ward Beecher
Heaven will be inherited by every man who has heaven in his soul.

Henry Ward Beecher
That state of mind in which a man is impressed with invisible things is faith.

Henry Ward Beecher
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
You may say, "I wish to send this ball so as to kill the lion crouching yonder, ready to spring upon me. My wishes are all right, and I hope Providence will direct the ball." Providence won't. You must do it; and if you do not, you are a dead man.

Henry Ward Beecher
A Christian is nothing but a sinful man who has put himself to school for Christ for the honest purpose of becoming better.

Henry Ward Beecher
God puts the excess of hope in one man, in order that it may be a medicine to the man who is despondent.

Henry Ward Beecher
It is not painter or sculptor who is making himself most nobly immortal. It is he who is making true impressions upon the mind of man; frescoes for eternity, that will not shine out till the light of heaven reveals them; sculptures, not wrought in outward things, but in the inward nature and character of the soul.

Henry Ward Beecher
Religion is only another word for the right use of a man's whole self, instead of a wrong use of himself.

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
If a man meets with injustice, it is not required that he shall not be roused to meet it; but if he is angry after he has had time to think upon it, that is sinful. The flame is not wring, but the coals are.

Henry Ward Beecher
Sink the Bible to the bottom of the ocean, and still man's obligations to God would be unchanged. He would have the same path to tread, only his lamp and guide would be gone; the same voyage to make, but his chart and compass would be overboard!

Henry Ward Beecher
Any law that takes hold of a man's daily life cannot prevail in a community, unless the vast majority of the community are actively in favor of it. The laws that are the most operative are the laws which protect life.

Henry Ward Beecher
You never know till you try to reach them how accessible men are; but you must approach each man by the right door.

Henry Ward Beecher
All higher motives, ideals, conceptions, sentiments in a man are of no account if they do not come forward to strengthen him for the better discharge of the duties which devolve upon him in the ordinary affairs of life.

Henry Ward Beecher
If a man cannot be a Christian in the place where he is, he cannot be a Christian anywhere.

Henry Ward Beecher
The prouder a man is, the more he thinks he deserves, and the more he thinks he deserves, the less he really does deserve.

Henry Ward Beecher