Quotes from beecher henry ward xiii

Memory can glean, but can never renew. It brings us joys faint as is the perfume of the flowers, faded and dried, of the summer that is gone.

Liberty is the soul's right to breathe, and when it cannot take a long breath, laws are girdled too tight.

A man has a right to picture God according to his need, whatever it be.

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.

Life is full of amusement to an amusing man.

Wealth in activity--capital with all its friction--is far safer than invested wealth lying dead.

Home should be an oratorio of the memory, singing to all our after life melodies and harmonies of old remembered joy.

The plainest row of books that cloth or paper ever covered is more significant of refinement than the most elaborately carved furniture.

People may talk about the equality of the sexes! They are not equal. The silent smile of a sensible, loving woman will vanquish ten men.

Even a liar tells a hundred truths to one lie; he has to, to make the lie good for anything.

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.

Doctrine is nothing but the skin of truth set up and stuffed.

Unfruitful emotion is to be suspected. Feeling acts as an impulse, as a spur, as a spring, and when feelings are excited, and they put nothing forward, they are sometimes even dangerous to a man.

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.

If you are idle, you are on the road to ruin; and there are few stopping places upon it. It is rather a precipice than a road.

When there is love in the heart, there are rainbows in the eyes, which cover every black cloud with gorgeous hues.

When a church is faithless to its duties, the real church is outside its walls, in the community.

There are many Christians who like, about once in twelve months, to have a good revival in their hearts. They think that, like the year, they can make up for freezing and snowing all winter by a period of intense heat in the summer. The remedy for such is not to chill the revivals, but to shorten the intervals between them, and to endeavor to make their life equatorial and tropical all the year round.

Unless you have singing in the family and singing in the house, singing everywhere, until it becomes a habit, you never can have congregational singing; it will be the cold drops, half water, half ice, which drip in March from some cleft of rock, one drop here and another there; whereas it should be like the August shower, which comes ten million drops at once, and roars on the roof.