HENRY WARD BEECHER QUOTES XI

American clergyman (1813-1887)

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Not to fear where there is occasion, is as great a weakness as to fear unduly, without reason.... Fear is a kind of bell, or gong, which rings the mind into quick life and avoidance upon the approach of danger.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

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Pain is God's midwife, that helps some virtue into existence.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

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Suffering well borne is better than suffering removed.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

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

HENRY WARD BEECHER

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Some folks think that Christianity means a kind of insurance policy, and that it has little to do with this life, but that it is a very good thing when a man dies.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

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The philosophy of one century is the common sense of the next.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

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Defeat is a school in which Truth always grows strong.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

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Nothing in this world requires such long seasoning and ripening as new thoughts.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

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Hope is sweet-minded and sweet-eyed. It draws pictures; it weaves fancies; it fills the future with delight.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

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Religion would save a man; Christ would make him worth saving.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

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Very few men acquire wealth in such a manner as to receive pleasure from it. Just as long as there is the enthusiasm of the chase they enjoy it; but when they begin to look around, and think of settling down, they find that that part by which joy enters is dead in them. They have spent their lives in heaping up colossal piles of treasure, which stand, at the end, like the pyramids in the desert sands, holding only the dust of kings.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

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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

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Wealth in activity--capital with all its friction--is far safer than invested wealth lying dead.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

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A man can no more make money suddenly and largely, and be unharmed by it, than one could suddenly grow from a child's stature to a man's without harm.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

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Doctrine is nothing but the skin of truth set up and stuffed.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

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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

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Many men carry their religion as a church carries its bell--high up in a belfry, to ring out on sacred days, to strike for funerals, or to chime for weddings. All the rest of the time it hangs high above reach--voiceless, silent, dead.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

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

HENRY WARD BEECHER

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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

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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

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