American clergyman (1813-1887)
There is an ugly kind of forgiveness in this world--a kind of hedgehog forgiveness, shot out like quills.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
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
A childless man is like a loose engine in a ship. A man must be bolted and screwed to the community before he can work well for its advancement; and there are no such screws and bolts as children.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
A man has a right to picture God according to his need, whatever it be.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Life Thoughts
Christians ought not to slander God by looking as if they were at an everlasting funeral.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
Christians! It is your duty not only to be good, but to shine; and, of all the lights which you kindle on the face, Joy will reach farthest out to sea, where troubled mariners are seeking the shore.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Life Thoughts
If one could wallow amid filth for half a life and then wash himself clean in a day, then sin would be no worse than dirt on the hands which water can cleanse in a minute. Repentance may begin instantly, but reformation often requires a sphere of years.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
In the family, happiness is in the ratio in which each is serving the others, seeking one another's good, and bearing one another's burdens.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
Love ... like a lamp, it needs to be fed out of the oil of another's heart, or its flame burns low.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
Many professed Christians are like railroad station houses, and the wicked are whirled indifferently by them, and go on their way forgetting them; whereas they should be like switches, taking sinners off one track, and putting them on to another.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Life Thoughts
Never forget what a man has said to you when he was angry. If he has charged you with anything, you had better look it up. Anger is a bow that will shoot sometimes where another feeling will not.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Life Thoughts
Sorrows are gardeners: they plant flowers along waste places, and teach vines to cover barren heaps.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
That is the best baptism that leaves the man cleanest inside.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
The most hateful evil in the world is the evil that dresses itself in such a way that men cannot hate it. The men that make wickedness beautiful are the most utterly to be hated.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
There is but one resource for innocence among men or women, and that is an embargo upon all commerce of bad men.
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
To know that one has a secret is to know half the secret itself.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
You cannot sift out the poor from the community. The poor are indispensable to the rich.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
Boys have a period of mischief as much as they have measles or chicken-pox.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
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.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Lectures to Young Men on Various Important Subjects