HENRY WARD BEECHER QUOTES IX

American clergyman (1813-1887)

Laws are not masters but servants, and he rules them who obeys them.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit


Well-married, a man is winged--ill-matched, he is shackled.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit


Patriotism, in our day, is made to be an argument for all public wrong, and all private meanness. For the sake of country a man is told to yield every thing that makes the land honorable. For the sake of country a man must submit to every ignominy that will lead to the ruin of the state through disgrace of the citizen. There never was a man so unpatriotic as Christ was. Old Jerusalem ought to have been everything to him. The laws and institutions of his country ought to have been more to him than all the men in his country. They were not, and the Jews hated him; but the common people, like the ocean waters, moved in tides towards his heavenly attraction wherever he went.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Life Thoughts


There is no such thing as preaching patience into people, unless the sermon is so long that they have to practice it while they hear. No man can learn patience except by going out into the hurlyburly world, and taking life just as it blows. Patience is but lying to, and riding out the gale.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Life Thoughts


Blessed be the man whose work drives him. Something must drive men; and if it is wholesome industry, they have no time for a thousand torments and temptations.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit


There is nothing that makes more cowards and feeble men than public opinion.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit


A man without a vote ... is like a man without a hand.

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


That energy which makes a child hard to manage is the energy which afterward makes him a manager of life.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit


Sin is sweet in the mouth and bitter in digestion. It lies hard on the stomach.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit


Our virtues are like crystals hidden in rocks. No man shall find them by any soft ways, but by the hammer and by fire.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit


A cunning man overreaches no one half so much as himself.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Life Thoughts


There are some Christians whose secular life is an arid, worldly strife, and whose religion is but a turbid sentimentalism. Their life runs along that line where the overflow of the Nile meets the desert. It is the boundary line between sand and mud.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Life Thoughts


An ambition which has conscience in it will always be a laborious and faithful engineer, and will build the road, and bridge the chasms between itself and eminent success by the most faithful and minute performances of duty.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Life Thoughts


Some sins, like asps, always carry their sting with them.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit


Life is a plant that grows out of death.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit


Amid the discords of this life, it is blessed to think of heaven, where God draws after him an everlasting train of music; for all thoughts are harmonious and all feelings vocal, and so there is round about his feet eternal melody.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Life Thoughts


Our life is in the loom; it rolls up and is hidden as fast as it is woven. It is to be taken out of the loom only when we leave this world; then only shall we see the pattern.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit


God does not refuse to make himself known to man. He only will not do it by the symbolism of matter. He comes to us at once by the most natural course. We are in a transient state; our bodies are accidental, and God comes to us by that which is higher and truer--the intuitions of the soul.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Life Thoughts


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

Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit