Henry Ward Beecher quotes:

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I can forgive, but I cannot forget, is only another way of saying, I will not forgive. Forgiveness ought to be like a cancelled note - torn in two, and burned up, so that it never can be shown against one.
Greatness lies, not in being strong, but in the right using of strength; and strength is not used rightly when it serves only to carry a man above his fellows for his own solitary glory. He is the greatest whose strength carries up the most hearts by the attraction of his own.
The unthankful heart... discovers no mercies; but let the thankful heart sweep through the day and, as the magnet finds the iron, so it will find, in every hour, some heavenly blessings!
It is one of the severest tests of friendship to tell your friend his faults. So to love a man that you cannot bear to see a stain upon him, and to speak painful truth through loving words, that is friendship.
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.
Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures.
No matter what looms ahead, if you can eat today, enjoy today, mix good cheer with friends today enjoy it and bless God for it.
God pardons like a mother, who kisses the offense into everlasting forgiveness.
A Christian is nothing but a sinful man who has put himself to school for Christ for the honest purpose of becoming better.
We never know the love of a parent till we become parents ourselves.
The Church is not a gallery for the exhibition of eminent Christians, but a school for the education of imperfect ones.
Laughter is not a bad beginning for a friendship, and it is the best ending for one.
Laughter is day, and sobriety is night; a smile is the twilight that hovers gently between both, more bewitching than either.
The advertisements in a newspaper are more full knowledge in respect to what is going on in a state or community than the editorial columns are.
We sleep, but the loom of life never stops, and the pattern which was weaving when the sun went down is weaving when it comes up in the morning.
When a nation's young men are conservative, its funeral bell is already rung.
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.
There is no friendship, no love, like that of the parent for the child.
What we call wisdom is the result of all the wisdom of past ages. Our best institutions are like young trees growing upon the roots of the old trunks that have crumbled away.
The humblest individual exerts some influence, either for good or evil, upon others.
God asks no man whether he will accept life. That is not the choice. You must take it. The only choice is how.
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.
God appoints our graces to be nurses to other men's weaknesses.
Good nature is worth more than knowledge, more than money, more than honor, to the persons who possess it.
Law represents the effort of man to organize society; governments, the efforts of selfishness to overthrow liberty.
The worst thing in this world, next to anarchy, is government.
Every man should keep a fair-sized cemetery in which to bury the faults of his friends.
The head learns new things, but the heart forever practices old experiences.
Success is full of promise till one gets it, and then it seems like a nest from which the bird has flown.
It is the heart that makes a man rich. He is rich according to what he is, not according to what he has.
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.
The mother's heart is the child's schoolroom.
The dog was created specially for children. He is a god of frolic.
It's not the work which kills people, it's the worry. It's not the revolution that destroys machinery it's the friction.
All ambitions are lawful except those that climb upward on the miseries or credulities of mankind.
A book is good company. It is full of conversation without loquacity. It comes to your longing with full instruction, but pursues you never.
Heaven will be inherited by every man who has heaven in his soul.
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.
We are always on the anvil; by trials God is shaping us for higher things.
He is rich or poor according to what he is, not according to what he has.
Books are not made for furniture, but there is nothing else that so beautifully furnishes a house.
Riches are not an end of life, but an instrument of life.
Pride slays thanksgiving, but a humble mind is the soil out of which thanks naturally grow. A proud man is seldom a grateful man, for he never thinks he gets as much as he deserves.
To become an able and successful man in any profession, three things are necessary, nature, study and practice.
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.
He is greatest whose strength carries up the most hearts by the attraction of his own.
Love is the river of life in the world.
A man's true state of power and riches is to be in himself.
The most dangerous people are the ignorant.
Selfishness is that detestable vice which no one will forgive in others, and no one is without himself.
Hold yourself responsible for a higher standard than anybody expects of you. Never excuse yourself.
We should not judge people by their peak of excellence; but by the distance they have traveled from the point where they started.
To the great tree-loving fraternity we belong. We love trees with universal and unfeigned love, and all things that do grow under them or around them - the whole leaf and root tribe."
Wealth held by a class and used ambitiously becomes as despotic as an absolute monarchy, and has in its hands manners, customs, laws, institutions, and governments themselves.
There are sorrows that are not painful, but are of the nature of some acids, and give piquancy and flavor to life.
Genius unexerted is no more genius than a bushel of acorns is a forest of oaks.
Downright admonition, as a rule, is too blunt for the recipient.
We may cover a multitude of sins with the white robe of charity.
Ambition is the way in which a vulgar man aspires.
All human affairs follow nature's great analogue, the growth of vegetation. There are three periods of growth in every plant. The first, and slowest, is the invisible growth by the root; the second and much accelerated is the visible growth by the stem; but when root and stem have gathered their forces, there comes the third period, in which the plant quickly flashes into blossom and rushes into fruit.
Be angry, and yet do not sin; do not let the sun go down on your anger.
If a man meets with injustice, it is not required that he shall not be roused to meet it; but if he is angry after he has had time to think upon it, that is sinful. The flame is not wring, but the coals are.
Every tomorrow has two handles. We can take hold of it with the handle of anxiety or the handle of faith.
There was never a person who did anything worth doing that he did not receive more than he gave.
In the morning, we carry the world like Atlas; at noon, we stoop and bend beneath it; and at night, it crushes us flat to the ground.
Gratitude is the fairest blossom which springs from the soul.
Blessed are the happiness-makers! Blessed are they that take away attritions, that remove friction, that make the courses of life smooth, and the intercourse of men gentle!
Indeed, unless a man can link his written thoughts with the everlasting wants of men, so that they shall draw more from them as wells, there is no more immortality to the thoughts and feelings of the soul than to the muscles and bones.
The babe at first feeds upon the mother's bosom, but it is always on her heart.
I never knew an early-rising, hard-working, prudent man, careful of his earnings, and strictly honest who complained of bad luck.
If every child might live the life predestined in a mother's heart, all the way from the cradle to the coffin, he would walk upon a beam of light, and shine in glory.
The gravest events dawn with no more noise than the morning star makes in rising. All great developments complete themselves in the world and modestly wait in silence, praising themselves never, and announcing themselves not at all. We must be sensitive, and sensible, if we would see the beginnings and endings of great things. That is our part.
What a mother sings to the cradle goes all the way down to the coffin.
Success surely comes with conscience in the long run, other things being equal. Capacity and fidelity are commercially profitable qualities.
Ones best success comes after their greatest disappointments.
Men's best successes come after their disappointments.
Our best successes often come after our greatest disappointments.
That is true culture which helps us to work for the social betterment of all.
Sink the Bible to the bottom of the ocean, and still man's obligations to God would be unchanged. He would have the same path to tread, only his lamp and guide would be gone; the same voyage to make, but his chart and compass would be overboard!
The bibliophile is the master of his books, the bibliomaniac their slave.
It is not work that kills men; it is worry. Worry is rust upon the blade.
Speak of the appetite for drink; or of a bon-vivant's relish for dinner! What are these mere animal throes and ragings compared with those fantasies of taste, of those yearning of the imagination, of those insatiable appetites of intellect, which bewilder a student in a great bookseller's temptation-hall.
Where is human nature so weak as in the bookstore?
Every man should be born again on the first day of January. Start with a fresh page. Take up one hole more in the buckle if necessary, or let down one, according to circumstances; but on the first of January let every man gird himself once more, with his face to the front, and take no interest in the things that were and are past.
Every man should be born again on the first day of January. Start with a fresh page
Many a man has been dined out of his religion, and his politics, and his manhood, almost.
October is nature's funeral month. Nature glories in death more than in life. The month of departure is more beautiful than the month of coming - October than May. Every green thin loves to die in bright colors.
If anyone, then, asks me the meaning of our flag, I say to him - it means just what Concord and Lexington meant; what Bunker Hill meant; which was, in short, the rising up of a valiant young people against an old tyranny to establish the most momentous doctrine that the world had ever known - the right of men to their own selves and to their liberties.
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.
A library is but the soul's burying ground. It is a land of shadows.
Undoubtedly we render our consciences callous by evil indulgences; but we cannot entirely subdue that still, small voice.
You are not called to be a canary in a cage. You are called to be an eagle, and to fly sun to sun, over continents.
Caution and conservatism are expected of old age; but when the young men of a nation are possessed of such a spirit, when they are afraid of the noise and strife caused by the applications of the truth, heaven save the land! Its funeral bell has already rung.
Every charitable act is a stepping stone toward heaven.
If Christ is not divine, every impulse of the Christian world falls to a lower octave, and light and love and hope decline.
The test of Christian character should be that a man is a joy-bearing agent to the world.
Religion is the fruit of the Spirit, a Christian character, a true life.
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.
No coffee can be good in the mouth that does not first send a sweet offering of odor to the nostrils.
The philosophy of one century is the common sense of the next.
Compassion will cure more sins than condemnation.
The ability to convert ideas to things is the secret of outward success.
A book is a garden; A book is an orchard; A book is a storehouse; A book is a party. It is company by the way; it is a counselor; it is a multitude of counselors.
Conscience is the frame of character, and love is the covering for it.
To the covetous man life is a nightmare, and God lets him wrestle with it as best he may.
It is not well for a man to pray cream and live skim milk.
A cunning man overreaches no one half as much as himself.
The cynic is one who never sees a good quality in a man, and never fails to see a bad one. He is the human owl, vigilant in darkness and blind to light, mousing for vermin, and never seeing noble game.
The cynic puts all human actions into two classes - openly bad and secretly bad.
It gives one a sudden start in going down a barren, stoney street, to see upon a narrow strip of grass, just within the iron fence, the radiant dandelion, shining in the grass, like a spark dropped from the sun.
There is so much that is deaf and dumb in man, and so much that is paralyzed, so much that is shrunken, that nothing short of a miraculous touch of re-creation can make them at death perfect beings.
An oyster, that marvel of delicacy, that concentration of sapid excellence, that mouthful bwefore all other mouthfuls, who first had faith to believe it, and courage to execute? The exterior is not persuasive.
Despondency is ingratitude; hope is God's worship.
A good digestion is as truly obligatory as a good conscience; pure blood is as truly a part of mankind as a pure faith; and a well ordered skin is the first condition of that cleanliness which is next to Godliness.
Home should be the center of joy, equatorial and tropical.
I think you might dispense with half your doctors if you would only consult Dr. Sun more.
It's easier to go down a hill than up it but the view is much better at the top.
Happiness is not the end of life: character is.
Love cannot endure indifference. It needs to be wanted. Like a lamp, it needs to be fed out of the oil of another's heart, or its flame burns low.
Difficulties are God's errands; and when we are sent upon them, we should esteem it a proof of God's confidence,

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