Quotes from Henry Ward Beecher

Love is the river of life in this world.

Books are not made for furniture, but there is nothing else that so beautifully furnishes a house.

In friendship your heart is like a bell struck every time your friend is in trouble.

Tyrannies are overthrown by ideas. Armies are defeated by ideas. Nations, and Time itself, are overmatched by ideas.

Love is the medicine of all moral evil. By it the world is to be cured of sin.

Love is God's loaf; and this is that feeding for which we are taught to pray, "Give us this day our daily bread."

He who hunts for flowers will finds flowers; and he who loves weeds will find weeds.

The ignorant classes are the dangerous classes.

The Church is not a gallery for the exhibition of eminent Christians, but a school for the education of imperfect ones.

Of all man's works of art, a cathedral is greatest. A vast and majestic tree is greater than that.

Maple-trees are the cows of trees (spring-milked).

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.

A man ought to carry himself in the world as an orange tree would if it could walk up and down in the garden, swinging perfume from every little censer it holds up in the air.

The elms of New England! They are as much a part of her beauty as the columns of the Parthenon were the glory of its architecture.

A traitor is good fruit to hang from the boughs of the tree of liberty.

What if you have seen it before, ten thousand times over? An apple tree in full blossom is like a message, sent fresh from heaven to earth, of purity and beauty.

No town can fail of beauty, though its walks were gutters and its houses hovels, if venerable trees make magnificent colonnades along its streets.

The superfluous blossoms on a fruit tree are meant to symbolize the large way God loves to do pleasant things.

Anxiety in human life is what squeaking and grinding are in machinery that is not oiled. In life, trust is the oil.

If Christ is the wisdom of God and the power of God in the experience of those who trust and love Him, there needs no further argument of His divinity.

Conscience is the frame of character, and love is the covering for it.

Love is ownership. We own whom we love. The universe is God's because He loves.

What the heart has once owned and had, it shall never lose.

The soul is a temple; and God is silently building it by night and by day. Precious thoughts are building it; disinterested love is building it; all-penetrating faith is building it.