Henry Ward Beecher
The world's battlefields have been in the heart chiefly; more heroism has been displayed in the household and the closet, than on the most memorable battlefields in history.
When a nation's young men are conservative, its funeral bell is already rung.
It is not well for a man to pray cream and live skim milk.
God made man to go by motives, and he will not go without them, any more than a boat without steam or a balloon without gas.
Expedients are for the hour, but principles are for the ages.
If a man cannot be a Christian in the place where he is, he cannot be a Christian anywhere.
What a mother sings to the cradle goes all the way down to the coffin.
Children are unpredictable. You never know what inconsistency they are going to catch you in next.
A Christian is nothing but a sinful man who has put himself to school for Christ for the honest purpose of becoming better.
Riches are not an end of life, but an instrument of life.
Selfishness is that detestable vice which no one will forgive in others, and no one is without himself.
Where is human nature so weak as in the bookstore?
I don't like these cold, precise, perfect people, who, in order not to speak wrong, never speak at all, and in order not to do wrong, never do anything.
The ability to convert ideas to things is the secret of outward success.
A book is good company. It is full of conversation without loquacity. It comes to your longing with full instruction, but pursues you never.
It is not the going out of port, but the coming in, that determines the success of a voyage.
It is not what we take up, but what we give up, that makes us rich.
No man is sane who does not know how to be insane on proper occasions.
The moment an ill can be patiently handled, it is disarmed of its poison, though not of its pain.
Books are not men and yet they stay alive.
The real democratic American idea is, not that every man shall be on a level with every other man, but that every man shall have liberty to be what God made him, without hindrance.
I pray on the principle that wine knocks the cork out of a bottle. There is an inward fermentation, and there must be a vent.
There is no faculty of the human soul so persistent and universal as that of hatred.
Laugh at your friends, and if your friends are sore; So much the better, you may laugh the more.
To become an able and successful man in any profession, three things are necessary, nature, study and practice.
You and I do not see things as they are. We see things as we are.
Of all escape mechanisms, death is the most efficient.
The humblest individual exerts some influence, either for good or evil, upon others.
You have come into a hard world. I know of only one easy place in it, and that is the grave.
There are three schoolmasters for everybody that will employ them - the senses, intelligent companions, and books.
Next to ingratitude the most painful thing to bear is gratitude.
Beware of him who hates the laugh of a child.
All ambitions are lawful except those that climb upward on the miseries or credulities of mankind.
You cannot sift out the poor from the community. The poor are indispensable to the rich.
Suffering is part of the divine idea.
To know that one has a secret is to know half the secret itself.
The ignorant classes are the dangerous classes.
God appoints our graces to be nurses to other men's weaknesses.
A church debt is the devil's salary.
All men are tempted. There is no man that lives that can't be broken down, provided it is the right temptation, put in the right spot.
It's easier to go down a hill than up it but the view is much better at the top.
The sun does not shine for a few trees and flowers, but for the wide world's joy.
A library is not a luxury but one of the necessities of life.
The difference between perseverance and obstinacy is that one comes from a strong will, and the other from a strong won't.
Love is the river of life in the world.
Children are the hands by which we take hold of heaven.
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.
Compassion will cure more sins than condemnation.
The philosophy of one century is the common sense of the next.