Henry Ward Beecher Quotes
We should not judge people by their peak of excellence; but by the distance they have traveled from the point where they started.
The Church is not a gallery for the exhibition of eminent Christians, but a school for the education of imperfect ones.
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.
Some men are like pyramids, which are very broad where they touch the ground, but grow narrow as they reach the sky.
A person without a sense of humor is like a wagon without springs. It's jolted by every pebble on the road.
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?
Hold yourself responsible for a higher standard than anybody expects of you. Never excuse yourself.
Every tomorrow has two handles. We can take hold of it with the handle of anxiety or the handle of faith.
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 in the morning.
God made man to go by motives, and he will not go without them, any more than a boat without steam or a balloon without gas.
In the sacred precinct of that dwelling where the despotic woman wields the sceptre of fierce neatness, one treads as if he carried his life in his hands.
God asks no man whether he will accept life. That is not the choice. You must take it. The only choice is how.
Ones best success comes after their greatest disappointments.
Some sorrows are but footprints in the snow, which the genial sun effaces, or, if it does not wholly efface, changes into dimples.
A tool is but the extension of a man's hand, and a machine is but a complex tool. And he that invents a machine augments the power of a man and the well-being of mankind.
A Christian is nothing but a sinful man who has put himself to school for Christ for the honest purpose of becoming better.
A helping word to one in trouble is often like a switch on a railroad track-an inch between wreck and smooth-rolling prosperity.
Young love is a flame; very pretty, often very hot and fierce, but still only light and flickering. The love of the older and disciplined heart is as coals, deep-burning, unquenchable.
If a man harbors any sort of fear, it percolates through all his thinking, damages his personality, makes him landlord to a ghost.
No coffee can be good in the mouth that does not first send a sweet offering of odor to the nostrils.
The world's battlefields have been in the heart chiefly; more heroism has been displayed in the household and the closet, than on the most memorable battlefields in history.
When there is love in the heart, there are rainbows in the eyes, which cover every black cloud with gorgeous hues.
A world without a Sabbath would be like a man without a smile, like summer without flowers, and like a homestead without a garden. It is the most joyous day of the week.
A thoughtful mind, when it sees a nation's flag, sees not the flag, but the nation itself.
Of all the music that reached farthest into heaven, it is the beating of a loving heart.
Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures.
The art of being happy lies in the power of extracting happiness from common things.
If there be any one whose power is in beauty, in purity, in goodness, it is a woman.
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.
In this world it is not what we take up, but what we give up, that makes us rich.
Books are not made for furniture, but there is nothing else that so beautifully furnishes a house.
It is not the going out of port, but the coming in, that determines the success of a voyage.