Henry Ward Beecher Quotes

The true secret of giving advice is, after you have honestly given it, to be perfectly indifferent whether it is taken or not, and never persist in trying to set people right.

True obedience is true freedom.

Every charitable act is a stepping stone toward heaven.

People of too much sentiment are like fountains, whose overflow keeps a disagreeable puddle about them.

There is no such thing as white lies; a lie is as black as a coalpit, and twice as foul.

Laughter is day, and sobriety is night; a smile is the twilight that hovers gently between both, more bewitching than either.

If you are idle, you are on the road to ruin; and there are few stopping-places upon it. It is rather a precipice than a road

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

What a pity flowers can utter no sound!-A singing rose, a whispering violet, a murmuring honeysuckle ... oh, what a rare and exquisite miracle would these be!

The things that hurt us teach us.

No one thing does human life more need than a kind consideration of the faults of others. Every one sins; everyone needs forbearance. Our own imperfections should teach us to be merciful.

A little library, growing every year, is an honorable part of a man’s history. It is a man’s duty to have books.

I never knew an early-rising, hard-working, prudent man, careful of his earnings, and strictly honest who complained of bad luck.

The dog was created specially for children. He is a god of frolic.

That was a judicious mother who said, "I obey my children for the first year of their lives, but ever after I expect them to obey me.

Difficulties are God's errands; and when we are sent upon them, we should esteem it a proof of God's confidence.

God pardons like a mother, who kisses the offense into everlasting forgiveness.

Success is full of promise till one gets it, and then it seems like a nest from which the bird has flown.

Rain! whose soft architectural hands have power to cut stones, and chisel to shapes of grandeur the very mountains.

The ability to convert ideas to things is the secret of outward success.

Women are a new race, recreated since the world received Christianity.

If men had wings and bore black feathers, Few of them would be clever enough to be crows.

It is not work that kills men; it is worry. Worry is rust upon the blade.

A man without self-restraint is like a barrel without hoops, and tumbles to pieces.

Find out what your temptations are, and you will find out largely what you are yourself.

Selfishness is that detestable vice which no one will forgive in others, and no one is without himself.

To do good work a man should no doubt be industrious. To do great work he must certainly be idle a well.

God sends experience to paint men's portraits.

Sorrow makes men sincere.

True elegance becomes the more so as it approaches simplicity.

Yea, though the breath of disappointment should chill the sanguine heart, Speedily gloweth it again, warmed by the live embers of hope.

Death is the dropping of the flower, that the fruit may swell.

The difference between perseverance and obstinacy is that one comes from a strong will, and the other from a strong won't.

There are many persons who look on Sunday as a sponge to wipe out the sins of the week

Nature is a vast repository of manly enjoyments.

Our best successes often come after our greatest disappointments.

Theology is a science of mind applied to God.

The church is no more religion than the masonry of the aqueduct is the water that flows through it.

Mirth is God's medicine. Everybody ought to bathe in it.

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

Involved sentences, crooked, circuitous, and parenthetical, no matter how musically they may be balanced, are prejudicial to a facile understanding of the truth.

Love is God's loaf; and this is that feeding for which we are taught to pray, "Give us this day our daily bread."

We only see in a lifetime a dozen faces marked with the peace of a contented spirit.

We are but a point, a single comma, and God is the literature of eternity.

You cannot play the hypocrite before God; and to obtain pardon you must cease to sin, as well as to be exercised by a spirit of repentance.

Selfishness at the expense of others happiness is demonism.

When a man sells eleven ounces for twelve, he makes a compact with the devil, and sells himself for the value of an ounce.

There is an ugly kind of forgiveness in this world--a kind of hedgehog forgiveness, shot out like quills.

No man is sane who does not know how to be insane on proper occasions.

The last person one wants to be is themselves. Sadly, that is the best person to be.