Top 915 Quotes & Sayings by Henry Ward Beecher - Page 14

Oh, ye infidel philosophers, teach me how to find joy in sorrow, strength in weakness, and light in darkest days; how to bear buffeting and scorn; how to welcome death, and to pass through it into the sphere of life, and this not for me only, but for the whole world that groans and travails in pain; and till you can do this, speak not to me of a better revelation than the Bible.

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.

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.

God is the one great employer, thinker, planner, supervisor.

It is the very wantonness of folly for a man to search out the frets and burdens of his calling and give his mind every day to a consideration of them. They belong to human life. They are inevitable. Brooding only gives them strength.

The rarest feeling that ever lights a human face is the contentment of a loving soul.

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

O Lord God, we pray that we may be inspired to nobleness of life in the least things. May we dignify all our daily life. May we set such a sacredness upon every part of our life, that nothing shall be trivial, nothing unimportant, and nothing dull, in the daily round.

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.

People may excite in themselves a glow of compassion, not by toasting their feet at the fire, and saying: "Lord, teach me compassion," but by going and seeking an object that requires compassion.

God never made anything else so beautiful as man.

The worst prison is not of stone. It is of a throbbing heart, outraged by an infamous life.

That which distinguishes man from the brute is his power, in dealing with Nature, to milk her laws, and make them give forth their bounty.

Tyrannies are overthrown by ideas. Armies are defeated by ideas. Nations, and Time itself, are overmatched by ideas.

Self-government by the whole people is the teleologic idea. The republican form of government is the noblest and the best, as it is the latest.

It gives one a sudden start in going down a barren, stoney street, to see upon a narrow strip of grass, just within the iron fence, the radiant dandelion, shining in the grass, like a spark dropped from the sun.

Most of the debts of Europe represent condensed drops of blood.

The hunger of the eye is not to be despised; and they are to be pitied who have starvation of the eye.

When men enter into the state of marriage, they stand nearest to God.

Going out into life--that is dying. Christ is the door out of life.

All work and no plagiarism makes for dull sermons!

There can be no barrenness in full summer. The very sand will yield something. Rocks will have mosses, and every rift will have its wind-flower, and every crevice a leaf; while from the fertile soil will be reared a gorgeous troop of growths, that will carry their life in ten thousand forms, but all with praise to God. And so it is when the soul knows its summer. Love redeems its weakness, clothes its barrenness, enriches its poverty, and makes its very desert to bud and blossom as the rose.

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.

The great lever by which to raise and save the world is the unbounded love and mercy of God.

Prayer is often an argument of laziness: "Lord, my temper gives me a vast deal of inconvenience, and it would be a great task for me to correct it; and wilt thou be pleased to correct it for me, that I may get along easier?" If prayer was answered under such circumstances, independent of action of natural laws, it would be paying a premium on indolence.

There is no right more universal and more sacred, because lying so near the root of existence, than the right of men to their own labor.

All things in the natural world symbolize God, yet none of them speak of Him but in broken and imperfect words.

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

God's sovereignty is not in His right hand; God's sovereignty is not in His intellect; God's sovereignty is in His love.

Half the spiritual difficulties that men and women suffer arise from a morbid state of health.

Love is the wine of existence.

God is a being who gives everything but punishment in over measure.

A bird in a cage is not half a bird.

Precise knowledge is the only true knowledge, and he who does not teach exactly, does not teach at all.

The way to avoid evil is not by maiming our passions, but by compelling them to yield their vigor to our moral nature.

There is nothing that a New-Englander so nearly worships as an argument.

Men have a thousand desires to a bushel of choices.

This world is not a platform where you will hear Thalberg-piano-playing. It is a piano manufactory, where are dust and shavings and boards, and saws and files and rasps and sandpapers. The perfect instrument and the music will be hereafter.

Men are like trees: each one must put forth the leaf that is created in him.

Work is not a curse, but drudgery is.

Good men are not those who now and then do a good act, but men who join one good act to another.

Your honors here may serve you for a time, as it were for an hour, but they will be of no use to you beyond this world. Nobody will have heard a word of your honors in the other life. Your glory, your shame, your ambitions, and all the treasures for which you push hard and sacrifice much will be like wreaths of smoke. For these things, which you mostly seek, and for which you spend your life only tarry with you while you are on this side of the flood.

There is no part of government which cannot better suffer derangement than the ballot. If you strike the ballot with disease, it is heart disease.

Thou, Everlasting Strength, hast set Thyself forth to bear our burdens. May we bear Thy cross, and bearing that; find there is nothing else to bear; and touching that cross, find that instead of taking away our strength, it adds thereto. Give us faith for darkness, for trouble, for sorrow, for bereavement, for disappointment; give us a faith that will abide though the earth itself should pass away--a faith for living, a faith for dying.

Like a bird she seems to wear gay plumage unconsciously, as if it grew upon her.

Many men want wealth,--not a competence alone, but a live-story competence. Everything subserves this; and religion they would like as a sort of lightning-rod to their houses, to ward off by and by the bolts of Divine wrath.

What we call wisdom is the result of all the wisdom of past ages.

A mother is as different from anything else that God ever thought of, as can possibly be. She is a distinct and individual creation.

A book is a garden, an orchard, a storehouse, a party, a mentor, a teacher, a guidepost, a counsellor.

The most efficacious secular book that ever was published in America is the newspaper.

God wishes to exhaust all means of kindness before His hand takes hold on justice.

Now, men think, with regard to their conduct, that, if they were to lift themselves up gigantically and commit some crashing sin, they should never be able to hold up their heads; but they will harbor in their souls little sins, which are piercing and eating them away to inevitable ruin.

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!

A mother's prayers, silent and gentle, can never miss the road to the throne of all bounty.

Men can make an idol of the Bible.

So we fall asleep in Jesus. We have played long enough at the games of life, and at last we feel the approach of death. We are tired out, and we lay our heads back on the bosom of Christ, and quietly fall asleep.

Customs represent the experience of mankind.

A boy is a piece of existence quite separate from all things else, and deserves separate chapters in the natural history of men.

Love is not a possession but a growth. The heart is a lamp with just oil enough to burn for an hour, and if there be no oil to put in again its light will go out. God's grace is the oil that fills the lamp of love.

The Divine mind does not think for us, or inspite of us, but works in us to think, and to will, and to do.