HENRY WARD BEECHER QUOTES XVI

American clergyman (1813-1887)

Men who stand on any other foundation than the rock Christ Jesus are like birds that build in trees by the side of rivers. The bird sings in the branches, and the river sings below, but all the while the waters are undermining the soil about the roots, till, in some unsuspected hour, the tree falls with a crash into the stream; and then its nest is sunk, its home is gone, and the bird is a wanderer.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Life Thoughts


When leisure is a selfish luxury, its very activity, when it stirs, is apt to be only a kind of indolence taking exercise, that it may the better digest its selfishness.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Life Thoughts


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

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Life Thoughts


Tears are often the telescope by which men see far into heaven.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit


Every artist dips his brush in his own soul and paints his own nature into his pictures.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit


A man that has lost moral sense is like a man in battle with both of his legs shot off: he has nothing to stand on.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit


Religion is the whole soul marching heavenward to the music of joy and love, with well-ranked faculties, every one of them beating time and keeping tune.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit


God's whole nature moves toward the man who wants to be free from sin, as broadly and irresistibly as the summer moves from the south toward the north.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit


Heaven will be inherited by every man who has heaven in his soul.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Life Thoughts


There are many Christians who like, about once in twelve months, to have a good revival in their hearts. They think that, like the year, they can make up for freezing and snowing all winter by a period of intense heat in the summer. The remedy for such is not to chill the revivals, but to shorten the intervals between them, and to endeavor to make their life equatorial and tropical all the year round.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Life Thoughts


Death is the Christian's vacation morning. School is out. It is time to go home.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Life Thoughts


Money in the hands of one or two men is like a dungheap in a barnyard. So long as it lies in a mass, it does no good; but, if it is only spread out evenly on the land, everything will grow.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit


As the cream abandons the milk from which it took its life, and rises to the top and rides there, so men, because they are richer than those around about them, separate themselves, and all mankind below them they regard as skim milk.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit


It is the sum of the million little unconscious dispositions that go to make life joyful or painful.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit


A man whose religion is dominated by overhanging gloom or fear misrepresents religion as much as a cloudy day would misrepresent a sunshiny day, or as much as January would misrepresent June.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit


There ought to be such an atmosphere in every Christian church, that a man going there and sitting two hours should take the contagion of heaven, and carry home a fire to kindle the altar whence he came.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Life Thoughts


A man ought to carry himself in the world as an orange tree would if it could walk up and down in the garden--swinging perfume from every little censer it holds up to the air.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Life Thoughts


It is one of the worst effects of prosperity to make a man a vortex instead of a fountain; so that, instead of throwing out, he learns only to draw in.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Life Thoughts


We are apt to believe in Providence so long as we have our own way; but if things go awry, then we think, if there is a God, he is in heaven, and not on earth.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Life Thoughts


Love is the wine of existence. When you have taken that, you have taken the most precious drop that there is in the cluster.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit