Inspirational Quotes by Henry Ward Beecher
“A sermon is not like a Chinese firecracker to be fired off for the noise it makes. It is a hunter's gun, and at every discharge he should look to see his game fall.”
topics: Preaching
“A proud man is seldom a grateful man, for he never thinks he gets as much as he deserves.”
topics: Pride
“Next to ingratitude the most painful thing to bear is gratitude.”
“Pride slays thanksgiving, but an humble mind is the soil out of which thanks naturally grow.”
“The true secret of giving advice is, after you have honestly given it, to be perfectly indifferent whether it is taken or not, and never persist in trying to set people right.”
topics: Pride
“Watch lest prosperity destroy generosity.”
“To know that one has a secret is to know half the secret itself.”
topics: Reasoning
“Young love is a flame; very pretty, often very hot and fierce, but still only light and flickering. The love of the older and disciplined heart is as coals, deep-burning, unquenchable.”
“Mirth is God's medicine. Everybody ought to bathe in it.”
“Biblia este harta lui Dumnezeu după care să te ghidezi, să te ferească de fundul mării, să îţi arate unde este portul şi cum ajungi la el fără să eşuezi pe stânci sau bancuri de nisip.”
topics: christian-life
“If you attempt to beat a man down and to get his goods for less than a fair price, you are attempting to commit burglary, as much as though you broke into his shop to take the things without paying for them.”
“No emotion any more than a wave,can long retain its own individual form.”
“Tutto ciò che è quasi vero è in realtà completamente falso, ed è l'errore più pericoloso in cui si possa incorrere, perché più si va vicino alla verità e più probabilità ci sono di andare del tutto fuori strada.”
“An oyster, that marvel of delicacy, that concentration of sapid excellence, that mouthful before all other mouthfuls, who first had faith to believe it, and courage to execute? the exterior is not persuasive.”
topics: oyster
“A man’s ledger does not tell what he is, or what he is worth. Count what is in man, not what is on him, if you would know what he is worth — whether rich or poor.”
“On this side of the grave we are exiles; on that, citizens.”
“It is not the going out of port, but the coming in, that determines the success of the voyage.”
“four years ago—one plaintive yet manful thought, which has never yet reached the public eye: “Three nights ago, stepping out after midnight and looking up at the stars, which were clear and numerous, it struck me with a strong, new kind of feeling: ‘In a little while I shall have seen you also for the last time. God Almighty’s own theater of immensity—the infinite made palpable and visible to me—that also will be closed—flung too in my face—and I shall never behold death any more.’ The thought of the eternal deprivation even of this, tho this is such a nothing in comparison, was sad and painful to me. And then a second feeling rose upon me: ‘What if Omnipotence that has developed in me these appetites, these reverences, these infinite affections, should actually have said, Yes, poor mortal, such as you who have gone so far, shall be permitted to go further. Hope! despair not!’ God’s will, not ours, be done.”
“One best success comes after their greatest disappointments.”
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Henry Ward Beecher was an American preacher and reformer, born in Litchfield, Connecticut. He was the eighth child of Lyman and Roxana Foote Beecher, and brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe.
Reared in a Puritan atmosphere, he has graphically described the mystical experience which, coming to him in his early youth, changed his whole conception of theology and determined his choice of the ministry.
It was in the pulpit that Beecher was seen at his best. His mastery of the English tongue, his dramatic power, his instinctive art of impersonation, which had become a second nature, his vivid imagination, his breadth of intellectual view, his quaint humor alternating with genuine pathos, and above all his simple and singularly unaffected devotional nature, made him as a preacher without a peer in his own time and country.
He was stricken with apoplexy while still active in the ministry, and died at Brooklyn on the 8th of March 1887, in the seventy-fourth year of his age.