Quotes from Henry Ward Beecher

When a nation's young men are conservative, its funeral bell is already rung.

The reason that men are so slow to confess their vices is because they have not yet abandoned them.

A man that has lost moral sense is like a man in battle with both of his legs shot off: he has nothing to stand on.

Very few men acquire wealth in such a manner as to receive pleasure from it.

No man is good for anything who has not some particle of obstinacy to use upon occasion.

Our life is but a new form of the way men have lived from the beginning.

Books are not men and yet they stay alive.

Some men are, in regard to ridicule, like tin-roofed buildings in regard to hail: all that hits them bounds rattling off; not a stone goes through.

It is one of the worst effects of prosperity to make a man a vortex instead of a fountain; so that, instead of throwing out, he learns only to draw in.

The most miserable pettifogging in the world is that of a man in the court of his own consciences.

It is defeat that turns bone to flint, gristle to muscle, and makes men invincible.

Sharp men, like sharp needles, break easy, though they pierce quick.

Men are not put into this world to be everlastingly played on by the harping fingers of joy.

No cradle for an emperor's child was ever prepared with so much magnificence as this world has been made for man. But it is only his cradle.

A man who does not love praise is not a full man.

Conceited men often seem a harmless kind of men, who, by an overweening self-respect, relieve others from the duty of respecting them at all.

A man is a great bundle of tools. He is born into this life without the knowledge of how to use them. Education is the process of learning their use.

A man without ambition is like a beautiful worm - it can creep, but it cannot fly.

He is the happiest man who is engaged in a business which tasks the most faculties of his mind.

Man is at the bottom an animal, midway a citizen, and at the top divine. But the climate of this world is such that few ripen at the top.

When flowers are full of heaven-descended dews, they always hang their heads; but men hold theirs the higher the more they receive, getting proud as they get full.

A man should fear when he only enjoys what good he does publicly. Is it not the publicity rather than the charity he loves? Is it not vanity, rather than benevolence, that gives such charities?

Well-married, a man is winged: ill-matched, he is shackled.

There are some men's souls that are so thin, so almost destitute of what is the true idea of soul, that were not the guardian angels so keen-sighted, they would altogether overlook them.