Top 500 Henry Ward Beecher Quotes (2025 Update)
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401. “Man is that name of power which rises above them all, and gives to every one the right to be that which God meant he should be.”

— Henry Ward Beecher

402. “A man in the right, with God on his side, is in the majority, though he be alone, for God is multitudinous above all populations of the earth.”

— Henry Ward Beecher

403. “Take from the Bible the Godship of Christ, and it would be but a heap of dust.”

— Henry Ward Beecher

404. “The superfluous blossoms on a fruit tree are meant to symbolize the large way God loves to do pleasant things.”

— Henry Ward Beecher

405. “A man without a vote is in this land like a man without a hand.”

— Henry Ward Beecher

406. “There is not a single heart but has its moments of longing.”

— Henry Ward Beecher

407. “The tidal wave of God’s providence is carrying liberty throughout the globe.”

— Henry Ward Beecher

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

— Henry Ward Beecher

409. “There is in youth a purity of character which, when once touched and defiled, can never be restored; a fringe more delicate than frost-work, and which, when torn and broken, can never be re-embroidered.”

— Henry Ward Beecher

410. “Unfruitful emotion is to be suspected. Feeling acts as an impulse, as a spur, as a spring, and when feelings are excited, and they put nothing forward, they are sometimes even dangerous to a man.”

— Henry Ward Beecher

411. “Mirth is the sweet wine of human life. It should be offered sparkling with zestful life unto God.”

— Henry Ward Beecher

412. “He that lives by the sight of the eye may grow blind.”

— Henry Ward Beecher

413. “The hunger of the eye is not to be despised; and they are to be pitied who have starvation of the eye.”

— Henry Ward Beecher

414. “Sorrow makes men sincere.”

— Henry Ward Beecher

415. “Anxiety in human life is what squeaking and grinding are in machinery that is not oiled. In life, trust is the oil.”

— Henry Ward Beecher

416. “If any man is rich and powerful he comes under the law of God by which the higher branches must take the burnings of the sun, and shade those that are lower; by which the tall trees must protect the weak plants beneath them.”

— Henry Ward Beecher

417. “Public sentiment is to public officers what water is to the wheel of the mill.”

— Henry Ward Beecher

418. “Think of a man in a chronic state of anger!”

— Henry Ward Beecher

419. “The cynic puts all human actions into two classes – openly bad and secretly bad.”

— Henry Ward Beecher

420. “The mere wit is only a human bauble. He is to life what bells are to horses-not expected to draw the load, but only to jingle while the horses draw.”

— Henry Ward Beecher

421. “Where human life needs most sympathy, where usually it is the most barren, there it is that Christ is more likely to be found than anywhere else.”

— Henry Ward Beecher

422. “All work and no plagiarism makes for dull sermons!”

— Henry Ward Beecher

423. “Perverted pride is a great misfortune in men; but pride in its original function, for which God created it, is indispensable to a proper manhood.”

— Henry Ward Beecher

424. “In friendship your heart is like a bell struck every time your friend is in trouble.”

— Henry Ward Beecher

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

— Henry Ward Beecher

426. “God’s men are better than the devil’s men, and they ought to act as though they thought they were.”

— Henry Ward Beecher

427. “Refinement is the lifting of one’s self upwards from the merely sensual; the effort of the soul to etherealize the common wants and uses of life.”

— Henry Ward Beecher

428. “The Divine mind does not think for us, or inspite of us, but works in us to think, and to will, and to do.”

— Henry Ward Beecher

429. “Involved sentences, crooked, circuitous, and parenthetical, no matter how musically they may be balanced, are prejudicial to a facile understanding of the truth.”

— Henry Ward Beecher

430. “The meanest thing in the world is the devil.”

— Henry Ward Beecher

431. “Men who neglect Christ, and try to win heaven through moralities, are like sailors at sea in a storm, who pull, some at the bowsprit and some at the mainmast, but never touch the helm.”

— Henry Ward Beecher

432. “Indifference in religion is more fatal than skepticism. There is no pulse in indifference; skepticism may have warm blood.”

— Henry Ward Beecher

433. “The strong are God’s natural protectors of the weak.”

— Henry Ward Beecher

434. “A lie is a very short wick in a very small lamp. The oil of reputation is very soon sucked up and gone. And just as soon as a man is known to lie, he is like a two-foot pump in a hundred-foot well. He cannot touch bottom at all.”

— Henry Ward Beecher

435. “There is nothing that a New-Englander so nearly worships as an argument.”

— Henry Ward Beecher

436. “A very common flower adds generosity to beauty. It gives joy to the poor, to the rude, and to the multitudes who could have no flowers were nature to charge a price for her blossoms.”

— Henry Ward Beecher

437. “Christianity works while infidelity talks. She feeds the hungry, clothes the naked, visits and cheers the sick, and seeks the lost, while infidelity abuses her and babbles nonsense and profanity. ‘By their fruits ye shall know them.’”

— Henry Ward Beecher

438. “I pray on the principle that wine knocks the cork out of a bottle. There is an inward fermentation, and there must be a vent.”

— Henry Ward Beecher

439. “A man who cannot get angry is like a stream that cannot overflow, that is always turbid. Sometimes indignation is as good as a thunderstorm in summer, clearing and cooling the air.”

— Henry Ward Beecher

440. “What place is so rugged and so homely that there is no beauty; if you only have a sensibility to beauty?”

— Henry Ward Beecher

441. “Thinking is creating with God, as thinking is writing with the ready writer; and worlds are only leaves turned over in the process of composition, about his throne.”

— Henry Ward Beecher

442. “Christians should be like a flower store: the odor of sanctity should betray them wherever they are.”

— Henry Ward Beecher

443. “His nature is such that our often coming does not tire him. The whole burden of the whole life of every man may be rolled on to God and not weary him, though it has wearied man.”

— Henry Ward Beecher

444. “Rich men are to bear the infirmities of the poor, and wise are to bear the mistakes of the ignorant.”

— Henry Ward Beecher

445. “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.”

— Henry Ward Beecher

446. “There is not on earth so base a knave as the man who wins the love of a woman when he knows that he cannot or ought not to requite it.”

— Henry Ward Beecher

447. “This world is not a platform where you will hear Thalberg-piano-playing. It is a piano manufactory, where are dust and shavings and boards, and saws and files and rasps and sandpapers. The perfect instrument and the music will be hereafter.”

— Henry Ward Beecher

448. “One might as well attempt to calculate mathematically the contingent forms of the tinkling bits of glass in a kaleidoscope as to look through the tube of the future and foretell its pattern.”

— Henry Ward Beecher

449. “In the early ages men ruled by strength; now they rule by brain, and so long as there is only one man in the world who can think and plan, he will stand head and shoulders above him who cannot.”

— Henry Ward Beecher

450. “Success surely comes with conscience in the long run, other things being equal. Capacity and fidelity are commercially profitable qualities.”

— Henry Ward Beecher