Henry Ward Beecher - Star Papers (1855)

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They [birds] eat what they like, wipe their mouths on a limb, return thanks in a song, and wing away to a quiet nook to doze or meditate...

Henry Ward Beecher
We confess to a homely enthusiasm for clover - not the white clover, beloved of honey-bees - but the red clover.... We go through a field of red clover, like Solomon in a garden of spices.

Henry Ward Beecher
Flowers are weeds where they grow wildly and abundantly; and somewhere our rarest flowers are somebody's commonest.

Henry Ward Beecher
You cannot forget, if you would, those golden kisses all over the cheeks of the meadow, queerly called dandelions.

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
Age and youth look upon life from the opposite ends of the telescope; it is exceedingly long,--it is exceedingly short.

Henry Ward Beecher
Of all fools, a floral fool deserves the eminence.

Henry Ward Beecher
There are no such indefatigable entomologists as birds.

Henry Ward Beecher
A contest of roses is better than of horses.

Henry Ward Beecher
He who only does not appreciate floral beauty is to be pitied like any other man who is born imperfect.

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

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
Death? Translated into the heavenly tongue, that word means life!

Henry Ward Beecher
A very common flower adds generosity to beauty. It gives joy to the poor, to the rude, and to the multitudes who could have no flowers were nature to charge a price for her blossoms.

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

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
Speak of the appetite for drink; or of a bon-vivant's relish for dinner! What are these mere animal throes and ragings compared with those fantasies of taste, of those yearning of the imagination, of those insatiable appetites of intellect, which bewilder a student in a great bookseller's temptation-hall.

Henry Ward Beecher
Alas! Where is human nature so weak as in a book-store!

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
It is the end of art to inoculate men with the love of nature. But those who have a passion for nature in the natural way, need no pictures nor galleries. Spring is their designer, and the whole year their artist.

Henry Ward Beecher
As for marigolds, poppies, hollyhocks, and valorous sunflowers, we shall never have a garden without them, both for their own sake, and for the sake of old-fashioned folks, who used to love them.

Henry Ward Beecher
None love to speak so much, when the mood of speaking comes, as they who are naturally taciturn.

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