Quotes from Henry Ward Beecher

The call to religion is not a call to be better than your fellows, but to be better than yourself. Religion is relative to the individual.

Reason is a permanent blessing of God to the soul. Without it there can be no large religion.

There is no true and abiding morality that is not founded in religion.

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

Of all the music that reached farthest into heaven, it is the beating of a loving heart.

Learning, to be of much use, must have a tendency to spread itself among the common people.

We sleep, but the loom of life never stops, and the pattern which was weaving when the sun went down is weaving when it comes up in the morning.

The head learns new things, but the heart forever practices old experiences.

I don't like these cold, precise, perfect people, who, in order not to speak wrong, never speak at all, and in order not to do wrong, never do anything.

Leaves die, but trees do not. They only undress.

The monkey is an organized sarcasm upon the human race.

A world without a Sabbath would be like a man without a smile, like summer without flowers, and like a homestead without a garden. It is the most joyous day of the week.

Laughter is day, and sobriety is night; a smile is the twilight that hovers gently between both, more bewitching than either.

Mirth is God's medicine. Everybody ought to bathe in it.

Private opinion is weak, but public opinion is almost omnipotent.

Law represents the effort of man to organize society; governments, the efforts of selfishness to overthrow liberty.

Next to the pastoral came the agricultural life. When you add to that the manufacturing phase of development, society begins to fill out, and needs but wings to fly, and commerce is its wings.

Poverty is very good in poems but very bad in the house; very good in maxims and sermons but very bad in practical life.

As warmth makes even glaciers trickle, and opens streams in the ribs of frozen mountains, so the heart knows the full flow and life of its grief only when it begins to melt and pass away.

Greatness lies, not in being strong, but in the right using of strength; and strength is not used rightly when it serves only to carry a man above his fellows for his own solitary glory. He is the greatest whose strength carries up the most hearts by the attraction of his own.

He is greatest whose strength carries up the most hearts by the attraction of his own.

In this world, full often, our joys are only the tender shadows which our sorrows cast.

It is not when the cable lies coiled up on the deck that you know how strong or how weak it is; it is when it is put to the test.

A cobweb is as good as the mightiest cable when there is strain upon it.