Henry Ward Beecher - Man Quotes

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There are a great many doors open; but a door must be of a man's size or it is not meant for him.

Henry Ward Beecher
When a man sells eleven ounces for twelve, he makes a compact with the devil, and sells himself for the value of an ounce.

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
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
A man who cannot get angry is like a stream that cannot overflow, that is always turbid. Sometimes indignation is as good as a thunder-storm in summer, clearing and cooling the air.

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
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
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
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
The thistle is a prince. Let any man that has an eye for beauty take a view of the whole plant, and where will he see a more expressive grace and symmetry; and where is there a more kingly flower?

Henry Ward Beecher
While a man is stringing a harp, he tries the strings, not for music, but for construction. When it is finished it shall be played for melodies. God is fashioning the human heart for future joy. He only sounds a string here and there to see how far His work has progressed.

Henry Ward Beecher
A tool is but the extension of a man's hand, and a machine is but a complex tool. And he that invents a machine augments the power of a man and the well-being of mankind.

Henry Ward Beecher
A man that puts himself on the ground of moral principle, if the whole world be against him, is mightier than all of them.

Henry Ward Beecher
It is not work that kills men; it is worry. Work is healthy; you can hard put more upon a man than he can bear. Worry is rust upon the blade. It is not the revolution that destroys the machinery, but the friction.

Henry Ward Beecher
God asks no man whether he will accept life. That is not the choice. You must take it. The only choice is how.

Henry Ward Beecher
The cynic is one who never sees a good quality in a man and never fails to see a bad one. He is the human owl, vigilant in darkness and blind to light, mousing for vermin, and never seeing noble game. The cynic puts all human actions into two classes — openly bad and secretly bad.

Henry Ward Beecher
The strength of a man consists in finding out the way God is going, and going that way.

Henry Ward Beecher
Never forget what a man says to you when he is angry. Anger is a bow that will shoot sometimes where another feeling will not.

Henry Ward Beecher
No cradle for an emperor's child was ever prepared with so much magnificence as this world has been made for man. But it is only his cradle.

Henry Ward Beecher
When laws, customs, or institutions cease to be beneficial to man, they cease to be obligatory.

Henry Ward Beecher
In things pertaining to enthusiasm, no man is sane who does not know how to be insane on proper occasions.

Henry Ward Beecher
Men are not accustomed to buy books unless they want them. If, on visiting the dwelling of a man of slender means, I find the reason why he has cheap carpets and very plain furniture to be that he may purchase books, he rises at once in my esteem. Books are not made for furniture but there is nothing else that so beautifully furnishes a house.

Henry Ward Beecher
The best stock a man can invest in, is the stock of a farm; the best shares are plow shares; and the best banks are the fertile banks of a rural stream; the more these are broken the better dividends they pay.

Henry Ward Beecher
Pride slays thanksgiving, but a humble mind is the soil out of which thanks naturally grow. A proud man is seldom a grateful man, for he never thinks he gets as much as he deserves.

Henry Ward Beecher
A noble man compares and estimates himself by an idea which is higher than himself; and a mean man by one which is lower than himself. The one produces aspiration; the other, ambition. Ambition is the way in which a vulgar man aspires.

Henry Ward Beecher
Of all man's works of art, a cathedral is greatest. A vast and majestic tree is greater than that.

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

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
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