HENRY WARD BEECHER QUOTES VII

American clergyman (1813-1887)

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Spreading Christianity abroad is sometimes an excuse for not having it at home.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

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Men go shopping just as men go out fishing or hunting, to see how large a fish may be caught with the smallest hook.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

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Love is ownership. We own whom we love. The universe is God's because he loves.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

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I am suspicious of that church whose members are one in their beliefs and opinions. When a tree is dead, it will lie any way; alive, it will have its own growth. When men's deadness is in the church, and their life elsewhere, all will be alike. They can be cut and polished any way. When they are alive, they are like a tropical forest--some shooting up, like the mahogany tree; some spreading, like the vine; some darkling, like the shrub; some lying, herb-like, on the ground; but all obeying their own laws of growth--a common law of growth variously expressed in each--and so contributing to the richness and beauty of the wood.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

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A week filled up with selfishness, and the Sabbath stuffed full of religious exercises, will make a good Pharisee, but a poor Christian. There are many persons who think Sunday is a sponge with which to wipe out the sins of the week. Now, God's altar stands from Sunday to Sunday, and the seventh day is no more for religion than any other. It is for rest. The whole seven are for religion, and one of them for rest.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

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Words are but the bannerets of a great army, a few bits of waving color here and there; thoughts are the main body of the footman that march unseen below.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

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The beginning is the promise of the end.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

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Our life is but a new form of the way men have lived from the beginning.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

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It is often said it is no matter what a man believes if he is only sincere. This is true of all minor truths, and false of all truths whose nature it is to fashion a man's life. It will make no difference in a man's harvest whether he thinks turnips have more saccharine matter than potatoes--whether corn is better than wheat. But let the man sincerely believe that seed planted without ploughing is as good as with, that January is as favorable for seed sowing as April, and that cockle seed will produce as good a harvest as wheat, and will it make no difference?

HENRY WARD BEECHER

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In America there is not one single element of civilization that is not made to depend, in the end, upon public opinion.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

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The divine qualities of man are but the slightest hints, the faintest intimations, of the attributes of God.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

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Faith means a sanctified imagination, or the imagination applied to spiritual things.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

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When a man says that he is perfect already, there is only one of two places for him, and that is heaven or the lunatic asylum.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

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This world is magnificent for strangers and pilgrims, but miserable for residents.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

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There is no greater crime than to stand between a man and his development; to take any law or institution and put it around him like a collar, and fasten it there, so that as he grows and enlarges, he presses against it till he suffocates and dies.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

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The worst thing in this world, next to anarchy, is government.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

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The grossest, the cruelest, the most selfish, the most easily pervertible and perverted thing in this world, is government.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

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As the imagination is set to look into the invisible and immaterial, it seems to attract something of their vitality; and though it can give nothing to the body to redeem it from years, it can give to the soul that freshness of youth in old age which is even more beautiful than youth in the young.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

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There is in youth a purity of character which, when once touched and defiled, can never be restored; a fringe more delicate than frost-work, and which, when torn and broken, can never be re-embroidered.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

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The mischiefs of anarchy have been equaled by the mischiefs of government.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

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