American clergyman (1813-1887)
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
Laws and institutions are constantly tending to gravitate. Like clocks, they must be occasionally cleansed, and wound up, and set to true time.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Life Thoughts
Loving is like music. Some instruments can go up two octaves, some four, and some all the way from black thunder to sharp lightning. As some of them are susceptible only of melody, so some hearts can sing but one song of love, while others will fun in a full choral harmony.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Life Thoughts
Every time your enemy fires a curse, you must fire a blessing, and so you are to bombard back and forth with this kind of artillery. The mother grace of all the graces is Christian good-will.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Life Thoughts
In the family, happiness is in the ratio in which each is serving the others, seeking one another's good, and bearing one another's burdens.
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
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
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
We never know the love of our parents for us till we have become parents.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
Religion is only another word for the right use of a man's whole self, instead of a wrong use of himself.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
Christians should be like a flower store: the odor of sanctity should betray them wherever they are.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
No man ever grows to a full man's estate without the ministration of suffering.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
God puts the excess of hope in one man, in order that it may be a medicine to the man who is despondent.
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
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
A man never has good luck who has a bad wife.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
Our moral faculties must be placed highest, else they can no more flourish than could a plant growing under the shade and drip of trees.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
There is no harder shield for the devil to pierce with temptation than singing with prayer.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
That endless book, the newspaper, is our national glory.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
A people uneducated is like an iron mountain whose ore is unwrought.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit