American clergyman (1813-1887)
Men are not put into this world to be everlastingly played on by the harping fingers of joy.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
There are multitudes of persons whose idea of liberty is the right to do what they please, instead of the right of doing that which is lawful and best.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
When we have heartily repented of a wrong, we should let all the waves of forgetfulness roll over it, and go forward unburdened to meet the future.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
If we are like Christ, we shall seek, not to absorb, but to reflect the light which falls upon others, and thus we shall become pure and spotless.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Life Thoughts
Words are but the bannerets of a great army, a few bits of waving color here and there; thoughts are the main body of the footman that march unseen below.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
The grossest, the cruelest, the most selfish, the most easily pervertible and perverted thing in this world, is government.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
Wherever you have seen God pass, mark that spot, and go and sit in that window again.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
There is a kind of indignation excited in us when one likens our grief to his own. The soul is jealous of its experiences, and does not like pride to be humbled by the thought that they are common. For, though we know that the world groans and travails in pain, and has done so for ages, yet a groan heard by our ears is a very different thing from a groan uttered by our mouth. The sorrows of other men seem to us like clouds of rain that empty themselves in the distance, and whose long-travelling thunder comes to us mellowed and subdued; but our own troubles are like a storm bursting right overhead, and sending down its bolts upon us with direct plunge.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Life Thoughts
Men go shopping just as men go out fishing or hunting, to see how large a fish may be caught with the smallest hook.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
God's nature is medicinal to ours. There are no troubles which befall our suffering hearts, for which there is not in God a remedy, if only we rise to receive it.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
Indifference in religion is more fatal than skepticism. There is no pulse in indifference; skepticism may have warm blood.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
The way to begin a Christian life is not to study theology. Piety before theology. Right living will produce right thinking. Yet many men, when their consciences are aroused, run for catechisms, and commentaries, and systems. They do not mean to be shallow Christians. They intend to be thorough, if they enter upon the Christian life at all. Now, theologies are well in their place; but repentance and love must come before all other experiences. First a cure for your sin-sick soul, and then theologies. Suppose a man were taken with the cholera, and, instead of sending for a physician, he should send to a bookstore, and buy all the books which have been written on the human system, and, while the disease was working in his vitals, he should say, "I'll not put myself in the hands of any of these doctors. I shall probe this thing to the bottom." Would it not be better for him first to be cured of the cholera?
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Life Thoughts
Our life is but a new form of the way men have lived from the beginning.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Life Thoughts
Every thought and feeling is a painting stroke, in the darkness, of our likeness that is to be; and our whole life is but a chamber, which we are frescoing with colors that do not appear while being laid on wet, but which will shine forth afterwards, when finished and dry.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Life Thoughts
A law is valuable, not because it is a law, but because there is right in it.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Life Thoughts
Nowhere on the globe do men live so well as in America, or grumble so much.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
Character, like porcelain-ware, must be painted before it is glazed. There can be no change of color after it is burned in.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
A man has no more religion than he acts out in his life.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
It is the duty of Christians to make religion lovely; he who makes religion unlovely is more an infidel than if he simply denied the doctrines of Christianity. He is a worm at the core, and not a worm on the leaf.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
God designed men to grow as trees grow in open pastures, full-boughed all around; but men in society grow like trees in forests, tall and spindling, the lower ones overshadowed by the higher, with only a little branching, and that at the top. They borrow of each other the power to stand; and if the forest be cleared, and one be left alone, the first wind which comes uproots it.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Life Thoughts