Henry Ward Beecher quotes

“It is the heart that makes a man rich. He is rich according to what he is, not according to what he has.”

— Henry Ward Beecher

“Laughter is not a bad beginning for a friendship, and it is the best ending for one.”

— Henry Ward Beecher

“Now comes the mystery.”

— Henry Ward Beecher

“Suffering is part of the divine idea.”

— Henry Ward Beecher

“The philosophy of one century is the common sense of the next.”

— Henry Ward Beecher

“There are three schoolmasters for everybody that will employ them - the senses, intelligent companions, and books.”

— Henry Ward Beecher

“You have come into a hard world. I know of only one easy place in it, and that is the grave.”

— Henry Ward Beecher

“Beware of him who hates the laugh of a child.”

— Henry Ward Beecher

“Books are not men and yet they stay alive.”

— Henry Ward Beecher

“Expedients are for the hour, but principles are for the ages.”

— Henry Ward Beecher

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

— Henry Ward Beecher

“Laugh at your friends, and if your friends are sore; So much the better, you may laugh the more.”

— Henry Ward Beecher

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

— Henry Ward Beecher

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

— Henry Ward Beecher

“Of all escape mechanisms, death is the most efficient.”

— Henry Ward Beecher

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

— Henry Ward Beecher

“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.”

— Henry Ward Beecher

“The ignorant classes are the dangerous classes.”

— Henry Ward Beecher

“The soul without imagination is what an observatory would be without a telescope.”

— Henry Ward Beecher

“We steal if we touch tomorrow. It is God's.”

— Henry Ward Beecher

“You cannot sift out the poor from the community. The poor are indispensable to the rich.”

— Henry Ward Beecher

“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.”

— Henry Ward Beecher

“The real democratic American idea is, not that every man shall be on a level with every other man, but that every man shall have liberty to be what God made him, without hindrance.”

— Henry Ward Beecher

“The world's battlefields have been in the heart chiefly; more heroism has been displayed in the household and the closet, than on the most memorable battlefields in history.”

— Henry Ward Beecher

“There are joys which long to be ours. God sends ten thousands truths, which come about us like birds seeking inlet; but we are shut up to them, and so they bring us nothing, but sit and sing awhile upon the roof, and then fly away.”

— Henry Ward Beecher

“What we call wisdom is the result of all the wisdom of past ages. Our best institutions are like young trees growing upon the roots of the old trunks that have crumbled away.”

— Henry Ward Beecher