HENRY WARD BEECHER QUOTES VII

American clergyman (1813-1887)

No people are so easy to govern as the intelligent, and none are so hard to govern as the ignorant.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit


We need not fear shipwreck when God is the pilot.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit


God makes the life fertile by disappointments, as he makes the ground fertile by frosts.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit


Men who neglect Christ, and try to win heaven through moralities, are like sailors at sea in a storm, who pull, some at the bowsprit and some at the mainmast, but never touch the helm.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Life Thoughts


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


Truth is the bread of a noble manhood.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit


Wealth held by a class and used ambitiously becomes as despotic as an absolute monarchy, and has in its hands manners, customs, laws, institutions, and governments themselves.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit


When a man says that he is perfect already, there is only one of two places for him, and that is heaven or the lunatic asylum.

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


A lie always needs a truth for a handle to it, else the hand would cut itself which sought to drive it home upon another. The worst lies, therefore, are those whose blade is false, but whose handle is true.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Life Thoughts


It is often said it is no matter what a man believes if he is only sincere. This is true of all minor truths, and false of all truths whose nature it is to fashion a man's life. It will make no difference in a man's harvest whether he thinks turnips have more saccharine matter than potatoes--whether corn is better than wheat. But let the man sincerely believe that seed planted without ploughing is as good as with, that January is as favorable for seed sowing as April, and that cockle seed will produce as good a harvest as wheat, and will it make no difference?

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Life Thoughts


Love is ownership. We own whom we love. The universe is God's because he loves.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Life Thoughts


The beginning is the promise of the end.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Life Thoughts


The law is a batter, which protects all that is behind it, but sweeps with destruction all that is outside.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit


We sleep, but the loom of life never stops; and the pattern which was weaving when the sun went down is weaving when it comes up tomorrow.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Life Thoughts


God is himself a vast medicine for man. It is the heart of God that carries restoration, inspiration, aspiration, and final victory.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit


I am suspicious of that church whose members are one in their beliefs and opinions. When a tree is dead, it will lie any way; alive, it will have its own growth. When men's deadness is in the church, and their life elsewhere, all will be alike. They can be cut and polished any way. When they are alive, they are like a tropical forest--some shooting up, like the mahogany tree; some spreading, like the vine; some darkling, like the shrub; some lying, herb-like, on the ground; but all obeying their own laws of growth--a common law of growth variously expressed in each--and so contributing to the richness and beauty of the wood.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Life Thoughts


In America there is not one single element of civilization that is not made to depend, in the end, upon public opinion.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit


One might as well attempt to calculate mathematically the contingent forms of the tinkling bits of glass in a kaleidoscope as to look through the tube of the future and foretell its pattern.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Life Thoughts


Repentance is the turning of the soul from the way of midnight to the point of the coming sun.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Life Thoughts