American clergyman (1813-1887)
Temptations are enemies outside the castle seeking entrance. If there be no false retainer within who holds treacherous parley, there can scarcely be even an offer.
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
God gives as the wheat gives: we sow one grain, and reap a hundred.
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
Men never _make_ truths; they only recognize the value of this currency of God. They find truths, as men sometimes find bills, in the street, and only recognize the value of that which other persons have drawn.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
Birds finish the nest with their own breast, so it is the bosom that makes the home, and not the bill or the claw.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
We never know the love of our parents for us till we have become parents.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
A Christianity which will not help those who are struggling from the bottom to the top of society, needs another Christ to die for it.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
Do not be troubled because you have not great virtues. God made a million spears of grass where he made one tree. The earth is fringed and carpeted, not with forests, but with grasses. Only have enough of little virtues and common fidelities, and you need not mourn because you are neither a hero nor a saint.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Life Thoughts
We have the promises of God as thick as daisies in summer meadows, that death, which men most fear, shall be to us the most blessed of experiences, if we trust in him. Death is unclasping; joy, breaking out in the desert; the heart, come to its blossoming time! Do we call it dying when the bud bursts into flower?
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Life Thoughts
Men think religion bears the same relation to life that flowers do to trees. The tree must grow through a long period before the blossoming time; so they think religion is to be a blossom just before death, to secure heaven. But the Bible represents religion, not as the latest fruit of life, but as the whole of it--beginning, middle, and end. It is simply right living.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Life Thoughts
Success is full of promise till men get it; and then it is a last year's nest, from which the bird has flown.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Life Thoughts
Righteousness is as hereditary as vice, and godly men transmit moral qualities to their children, and to their children's children.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
Joy is more divine than sorrow; for joy is bread, and sorrow is medicine.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
The religion of Jesus Christ is not ascetic, nor sour, nor gloomy, nor circumscribing. It is full of sweetness in the present and in promise.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
Where human life needs most sympathy, where usually it is the most barren, there it is that Christ is more likely to be found than anywhere else.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
We are but a point, a single comma, and God is the literature of eternity.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
Justice is never so slender to us as when we first practice it.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
A lie always needs a truth for a handle to it. The worst lies are those whose blade is false, but whose handle is true.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
A man never has good luck who has a bad wife.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit