HENRY WARD BEECHER QUOTES XV

American clergyman (1813-1887)

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

HENRY WARD BEECHER

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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

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

HENRY WARD BEECHER

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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

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That which distinguishes man from the brute is his power, in dealing with Nature, to milk her laws, and make them give forth their bounty.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

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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

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How many there are that spend their lives in the midst of all the pleasing trifles of that vast museum of curiosities which are labeled religious, and think themselves Christians!

HENRY WARD BEECHER

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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

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Man's faults lie like reptiles--like toads, like lizards, like serpents; and what if there is over them the evening sky, lit with glory, and all aglow? Are they less reptiles and toads because all is roseate around about them?

HENRY WARD BEECHER

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

HENRY WARD BEECHER

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It makes a great deal of difference what sort of God men believe in.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

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What are called "fanatics" and "extremists" are only the men that God sends to make up the general average which the unfaithfulness of others lowers.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

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He that lives by the sight of the eye may grow blind.

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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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

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It is one of the severest tests of friendship to tell your friend his faults. If you are angry with a man, or hate him, it is not hard to go to him and stab him with words; but so to love a man that you cannot bear to see the stain of sin upon him, and to speak painful truth through loving words--that is friendship. But few have such friends. Our enemies usually teach us what we are, at the point of the sword.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

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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

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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

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Many people keep their old sins warm while they go to try on virtue and see if they like it.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

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The fugitive, brief, though intense satisfactions that come to the nerves through the appetite and passions are not the foundations of joy in this world: they come with a moment's flash, and are disastrous in their flight.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

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