Quotes from Henry Ward Beecher

Morality is character and conduct such as is required by the circle or community in which the man's life happens to be placed. It shows how much good men require of us.

It takes a man to make a devil; and the fittest man for such a purpose is a snarling, waspish, red-hot, fiery creditor.

Education will not come of itself; it will never come unless you seek it; it will not come unless you take the first steps which lead to it; but, taking these steps, every man can acquire it.

It is part and parcel of every man's life to develop beauty in himself. All perfect things have in them an element of beauty.

Nowhere else can one find so miscellaneous, so various, an amount of knowledge as is contained in a good newspaper.

We under no circumstances know the appreciate of your parent till we develop into dad and mom ourselves.

When a man sells eleven ounces for twelve, he makes a compact with the devil, and sells himself for the value of an ounce.

Riches are not an end of life, but an instrument of life.

Interest works night and day in fair weather and in foul. It gnaws at a man's substance with invisible teeth.

The first hour of the morning is the rudder of the day.

One should go to sleep as homesick passengers do, saying, "Perhaps in the morning we shall see the shore.

The mother's heart is the child's schoolroom.

The babe at first feeds upon the mother's bosom, but it is always on her heart.

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.

It's easier to go down a hill than up it but the view is much better at the top.

A man without mirth is like wagon without springs, in which one is caused disagreeably to jolt by every pebble over which it turns.

What I spent, I had; What I kept, I lost; What I gave, I have.

What a pity flowers can utter no sound!-A singing rose, a whispering violet, a murmuring honeysuckle ... oh, what a rare and exquisite miracle would these be!

Music cleanses the understanding; inspires it, and lifts it into a realm which it would not reach if it were left to itself.

If a man harbors any sort of fear, it percolates through all his thinking, damages his personality, makes him landlord to a ghost.

Nature is a vast repository of manly enjoyments.

There is no man that lives who does not need to be drilled, disciplined, and developed into something higher and nobler and better than he is by nature. Life is one prolonged birth.

Nature holds an immense uncollected debt over every man's head.

Nature would be scarcely worth a puff of the empty wind if it were not that all Nature is but a temple, of which God is the brightness and the glory.