Quotes from Henry Ward Beecher

Reason can tell how love affects us, but cannot tell what love is.

What could make me love my fellow Christian better than to see that God loves us all as we were all one soul?

Everyone has conscience enough to hate; few have religion enough to love.

God's grace is the oil that fills the lamp of love.

Love is the world's river of life

Our earthly loves are but so many silver steps leading us up to the great golden love of God.

Every man should keep a fair-sized cemetery in which to bury the faults of his friends.

Hold yourself responsible for a higher standard than anybody expects of you. Never excuse yourself.

Every boy wants someone older than himself to whom he may go in moods of confidence and yearning. The neglect of this child's want by grown people . . . is a fertile source of suffering.

You have come into a hard world. I know of only one easy place in it, and that is the grave.

God asks no man whether he will accept life. This is not the choice. You must take it. The only question is how.

The advertisements in a newspaper are more full of knowledge in respect to what is going on in a state or community than the editorial columns are.

Where is human nature so weak as in the bookstore?

Our days are a kaleidoscope. Every instant a change takes place. ... New harmonies, new contrasts, new combinations of every sort. ... The most familiar people stand each moment in some new relation to each other, to their work, to surrounding objects.

A Christian is nothing but a sinful man who has put himself to school for Christ for the honest purpose of becoming better.

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.

A church debt is the devil's salary.

Do not be afraid of defeat. You are never so near to victory as when defeated in a good cause.

It is defeat that turns bone to flint; it is defeat that turns gristle to muscle; it is defeat that makes men invincible.

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

In things pertaining to enthusiasm, no man is sane who does not know how to be insane on proper occasions.

A person without a sense of humor is like a wagon without springs, jolted by every pebble in the road.

It is defeat that turns bone to flint; it is defeat that turns gristle to muscle; it is defeat that makes men invincible. Do not then be afraid of defeat. You are never so near to victory as when defeated in a good cause.

There is no such thing as white lies; a lie is as black as a coalpit, and twice as foul.