American clergyman (1813-1887)
Take from the Bible the Godship of Christ, and it would be but a heap of dust.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
Sorrows are gardeners: they plant flowers along waste places, and teach vines to cover barren heaps.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
Liberty is the soul's right to breathe, and when it cannot take a long breath, laws are girdled too tight.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Life Thoughts
It is not desirable that we should live as in the constant atmosphere and presence of death; that would unfit us for life; but it is well for us, now and then, to talk with death as friend talketh with friend, and to bathe in the strange seas, and to anticipate the experiences of that land to which it will lead us. These forethinkings are meant, not to make us discontented with life, but to bring us back with more strength, and a nobler purpose in living.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Life Thoughts
Selfishness at the expense of others' happiness is demonism.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
All true conflict should aim at peace.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
If every child might live the life predestined in a mother's heart, all the way from the cradle to the coffin, he would walk upon a beam of light, and shine in glory.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
Christians are like vases, they must pass through the fire ere they can shine. The graces which are to be their everlasting beauty and glory must be burned in.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
No church can be prospered in which all the ministration comes from the pulpit.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
We go to the grave of a friend, saying, "A man is dead;" but angels throng about him, saying, "A man is born."
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Life Thoughts
Defeat is a school in which Truth always grows strong.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Life Thoughts
We have the promises of God as thick as daisies in summer meadows, that death, which men most fear, shall be to us the most blessed of experiences, if we trust in him. Death is unclasping; joy, breaking out in the desert; the heart, come to its blossoming time! Do we call it dying when the bud bursts into flower?
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Life Thoughts
Suffering well borne is better than suffering removed.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Life Thoughts
As I grow older, and come nearer to death, I look upon it more and more with complacent joy, and out of every longing I hear God say, "O thirsting, hungering one, come to me." What the other life will bring I know not, only that I shall awake in God's likeness, and see him as he is. If a child had been born and spent all his life in the Mammoth Cave, how impossible would it be for him to comprehend the upper world! His parents might tell him of its life, and light, and beauty, and its sounds of joy; they might heap the sand into mounds, and try to show him by pointing to stalactites how grass, and flowers, and trees grow out of the ground, till at length, with laborious thinking, the child would fancy he had gained a true idea of the unknown land. And yet, though he longed to behold it, when the day came that he was to go forth, it would be with regret for the familiar crystals, and the rock-hewn rooms, and the quiet that reigned therein. But when he came up, some May morning, with ten thousand birds singing in the trees, and the heavens bright, and blue, and full of sunlight, and the wind blowing softly through the young leaves, all a-glitter with dew, and the landscape stretching away green and beautiful to the horizon, with what rapture would he gaze about him, and see how poor were all the fancyings and the interpretations which were made within the cave, of the things which grew and lived without; and how would he wonder that he could have regretted to leave the silence and the dreary darkness of his old abode! So, when we emerge from this cave of earth into that land where spring growths are, and where is summer, and not that miserable travesty which we call summer here, how shall we wonder that we could have clung so fondly to this dark and barren life!
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Life Thoughts
Wealth in activity--capital with all its friction--is far safer than invested wealth lying dead.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
The two poorest men in the world are buckled together at the opposite sides of the circle. The man who has so much money that he does not know what to do with it and the man who has no money at all touch each other, as you will find; and one is about as poor as the other.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
Religion would save a man; Christ would make him worth saving.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
Good men's prayers are carried by the angelic mail; but many men's prayers evidently go by the demoniac route. They are never so bad as after they have prayed.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
Adversity is the mint in which God stamps upon man his image and superscription.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
Next to ingratitude, the most painful thing to bear is gratitude.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit