American clergyman (1813-1887)
Many people keep their old sins warm while they go to try on virtue and see if they like it.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
It is the sum of the million little unconscious dispositions that go to make life joyful or painful.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
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
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
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
You cannot sift out the poor from the community. The poor are indispensable to the rich.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
Troubles are often the tools by which God fashions us for better things.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
Money in the hands of one or two men is like a dungheap in a barnyard. So long as it lies in a mass, it does no good; but, if it is only spread out evenly on the land, everything will grow.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
Love is the wine of existence. When you have taken that, you have taken the most precious drop that there is in the cluster.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
Heaven answers with us the same purpose that the tuning-fork does with musicians. Our affections, the whole orchestra of them, are apt to get below the concert-pitch; and we take heaven to tune our hearts by.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
Truths are first clouds, then rain, then harvests and food.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Life Thoughts
Religion is the whole soul marching heavenward to the music of joy and love, with well-ranked faculties, every one of them beating time and keeping tune.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
Men who stand on any other foundation than the rock Christ Jesus are like birds that build in trees by the side of rivers. The bird sings in the branches, and the river sings below, but all the while the waters are undermining the soil about the roots, till, in some unsuspected hour, the tree falls with a crash into the stream; and then its nest is sunk, its home is gone, and the bird is a wanderer.
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
God's whole nature moves toward the man who wants to be free from sin, as broadly and irresistibly as the summer moves from the south toward the north.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
As the cream abandons the milk from which it took its life, and rises to the top and rides there, so men, because they are richer than those around about them, separate themselves, and all mankind below them they regard as skim milk.
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
A man that has lost moral sense is like a man in battle with both of his legs shot off: he has nothing to stand on.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
The greatest architect and the one most needed is Hope.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
No grief has a right to immortality. That ground belongs to joy, to hope, to faith.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
Men judge of Christians by taking as fair samples those that lie rotten on the ground.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit