Top 500 Henry Ward Beecher Quotes (2025 Update)
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301. “Never be grandiloquent when you want to drive home a searching truth. Don’t whip with a switch that has the leaves on, if you want it to tingle.”

— Henry Ward Beecher

302. “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.”

— Henry Ward Beecher

303. “A mother has, perhaps, the hardest earthly lot; and yet no mother worthy of the name ever gave herself thoroughly for her child who did not feel that, after all, she reaped what she had sown.”

— Henry Ward Beecher

304. “Some people are proud of their humility.”

— Henry Ward Beecher

305. “Education is only like good culture, – it changes the size, but not the sort.”

— Henry Ward Beecher

306. “The diameter of each day is measured by the stretch of thought – not by the rising and setting of the sun.”

— Henry Ward Beecher

307. “The religion of Jesus Christ is not ascetic, nor sour, nor gloomy, nor circumscribing. It is full of sweetness in the present and in promise.”

— Henry Ward Beecher

308. “The fear of doing right is the grand treason in times of danger.”

— Henry Ward Beecher

309. “There is a temperate zone in the mind, between luxurious indolence and exacting work; and it is to this region, just between laziness and labor, that summer reading belongs.”

— Henry Ward Beecher

310. “A good digestion is as truly obligatory as a good conscience; pure blood is as truly a part of mankind as a pure faith; and a well ordered skin is the first condition of that cleanliness which is next to Godliness.”

— Henry Ward Beecher

311. “A woman’s pity often opens the door to love.”

— Henry Ward Beecher

312. “Nothing can be more airy and beautiful than the transparent seed-globe-a fairy dome of splendid architecture.”

— Henry Ward Beecher

313. “Life is full of amusement to an amusing man.”

— Henry Ward Beecher

314. “Every young man would do well to remember that all successful business stands on the foundation of morality.”

— Henry Ward Beecher

315. “It gives one a sudden start in going down a barren, stoney street, to see upon a narrow strip of grass, just within the iron fence, the radiant dandelion, shining in the grass, like a spark dropped from the sun.”

— Henry Ward Beecher

316. “An oyster, that marvel of delicacy, that concentration of sapid excellence, that mouthful bwefore all other mouthfuls, who first had faith to believe it, and courage to execute? The exterior is not persuasive.”

— Henry Ward Beecher

317. “Today is a goblet day. The whole heavens have been mingled with exquisite skill to a delicious flavor, and the crystal cup put to every lip. Breathing is like ethereal drinking. It is a luxury simply to exist.”

— Henry Ward Beecher

318. “We not only live among men, but there are airy hosts, blessed spectators, sympathetic lookers-on, that see and know and appreciate our thoughts and feelings and acts.”

— Henry Ward Beecher

319. “John Wesley quaintly observed that the road to heaven is a narrow path, not intended for wheels, and that to ride in a coach here and to go to heaven hereafter, was a happiness too much for man.”

— Henry Ward Beecher

320. “Newspapers are the schoolmasters of the common people.”

— Henry Ward Beecher

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

— Henry Ward Beecher

322. “If you are idle, you are on the road to ruin; and there are few stopping-places upon it. It is rather a precipice than a road.”

— Henry Ward Beecher

323. “Nothing dies so hard, or rallies so often as intolerance.”

— Henry Ward Beecher

324. “There are not anywhere else so many ways of trickery, so many false lights, so many veils, so many guises, so many illusive deceits, as are practiced in every man’s conscience in respect to his motives, thoughts, feelings, conduct, and character.”

— Henry Ward Beecher

325. “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.”

— Henry Ward Beecher

326. “Half the spiritual difficulties that men and women suffer arise from a morbid state of health.”

— Henry Ward Beecher

327. “Make men large and strong and tyranny will bankrupt itself in making shackles for them.”

— Henry Ward Beecher

328. “People may talk about the equality of the sexes! They are not equal. The silent smile of a sensible, loving woman will vanquish ten men.”

— Henry Ward Beecher

329. “To the great tree-loving fraternity we belong. We love trees with universal and unfeigned love, and all things that do grow under them or around them – the whole leaf and root tribe.”

— Henry Ward Beecher

330. “Gambling with cards or dice or stocks is all one thing. It’s getting money without giving an equivalent for it.”

— Henry Ward Beecher

331. “Men strengthen each other in their faults. Those who are alike associate together, repeat the things which all believe, defend and stimulate their common faults of disposition, and each one receives from the others a reflection of his own egotism.”

— Henry Ward Beecher

332. “In the morning, we carry the world like Atlas; at noon, we stoop and bend beneath it; and at night, it crushes us flat to the ground.”

— Henry Ward Beecher

333. “Even a liar tells a hundred truths to one lie; he has to, to make the lie good for anything.”

— Henry Ward Beecher

334. “When a man can look upon the simple wild-rose, and feel no pleasure, his taste has been corrupted.”

— Henry Ward Beecher

335. “No people are so easy to govern as the intelligent, and none are so hard to govern as the ignorant.”

— Henry Ward Beecher

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

— Henry Ward Beecher

337. “A man that puts himself on the ground of moral principle, if the whole world be against him, is mightier than all of them.”

— Henry Ward Beecher

338. “The continuance and frequent fits of anger produce in the soul a propensity to be angry; which oftentimes ends in choler, bitterness, and moronity, when the mid becomes ulcerated, peevish, and querulous, and is wounded by the least occurrence.”

— Henry Ward Beecher

339. “A man that does not know how to be angry does not know how to be good.”

— Henry Ward Beecher

340. “Character, like porcelain-ware, must be painted before it is glazed. There can be no change of color after it is burned in.”

— Henry Ward Beecher

341. “We let our blessings get mouldy, and then call them curses.”

— Henry Ward Beecher

342. “There are many troubles which you cannot cure by the Bible and the hymn-book, but which you can cure by a good perspiration and a breath of fresh air.”

— Henry Ward Beecher

343. “A man without ambition is worse than dough that has no yeast in it to raise it.”

— Henry Ward Beecher

344. “Next to ingratitude the most painful thing to bear is gratitude.”

— Henry Ward Beecher

345. “The sphere that is deepest, most unexplored, and most unfathomable, the wonder and glory of God’s thought and hand, is our own soul!”

— Henry Ward Beecher

346. “Flowers are sent to do God’s work in unrevealed paths, and to diffuse influence by channels that we hardly suspect.”

— Henry Ward Beecher

347. “Private opinion is weak, but public opinion is almost omnipotent.”

— Henry Ward Beecher

348. “Fear is the soul’s signal for rallying.”

— Henry Ward Beecher

349. “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.”

— Henry Ward Beecher

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

— Henry Ward Beecher