Inspirational Quotations

Inspirational Quotes by Henry Ward Beecher (American Protestant Clergyman)

Henry Ward Beecher (1813–87) was an American Congregational clergyman and a prominent advocate of social reform. He was one of the most influential Protestant ministers in the United States from 1850–87.

Born in Litchfield, Connecticut, Beecher was the son of the Presbyterian minister and temperance movement leader Lyman Beecher. Henry was educated at Amherst College, Massachusetts. He initially preached at Indianapolis and, in 1847, became the first pastor of Plymouth Congregational Church in Brooklyn, New York City. He remained there for the rest of his life and made it one of the most influential American pulpits, attracting crowds of 2,500 every Sunday.

Increasingly outspoken after the Civil War, Beecher supported a moderate Reconstruction policy for the South and advocated woman suffrage, evolutionary theory, and scientific biblical criticism.

For many years, Beecher wrote for The Independent and edited The Christian Union Oater Outlook after 1870. His 40 published volumes included Seven Lectures to Young Men (1844,) Summer in the Soul (1858,) Yale Lectures on Preaching (1874,) and Evolution and Religion (1885.)

Beecher was the brother of the abolitionist and novelist Harriet Beecher Stowe (author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852)) and the educationalist Catharine Beecher.

More: Wikipedia READ: Works by Henry Ward Beecher

Hold yourself responsible for a higher standard than anybody else expects of you. Never excuse yourself. Never pity yourself. Be a hard master to yourself—and be lenient to everybody else.
Henry Ward Beecher
Topics: Discipline, Excuses, Action, Excellence, Responsibility

Suffering is part of the divine idea.
Henry Ward Beecher
Topics: Suffering, Part of The Whole

I never knew an early-rising, hard-working, prudent man, careful of his earnings, and strictly honest who complained of bad luck.
Henry Ward Beecher
Topics: Character, Luck, Work

Gambling with cards, or dice, or stocks, is all one thing; it is getting money without giving an equivalent for it.
Henry Ward Beecher
Topics: Gambling

I read for three things: first, to know what the world has done during the last twenty-four hours, and is about to do today; second, for the knowledge that I specially want in my work; and third, for what will bring my mind into a proper mood.
Henry Ward Beecher
Topics: Reading

Do not be troubled because you have not great virtues. God made a million spears of grass where he made one tree. The earth is fringed and carpeted, not with forests, but with grasses. Only have enough of little virtues and common fidelities, and you need not mourn because you are neither a hero nor a saint.
Henry Ward Beecher
Topics: Virtue

To array a man’s will against his sickness is the supreme art of medicine.
Henry Ward Beecher
Topics: Medicine, Health

The difference between perseverance and obstinacy is that one often comes from a strong will, and the other from a strong won’t.
Henry Ward Beecher
Topics: Persistence, Perseverance

A man might frame, and let loose a star, to roll in its orbit, and yet not have done so memorable a thing before God, as he who lets go a golden-orbed thought to roll through the generations of time.
Henry Ward Beecher
Topics: Thought

It’s not the work which kills people, it’s the worry. It’s not the revolution that destroys machinery it’s the friction.
Henry Ward Beecher
Topics: Health, Revolution

Every man should use his intellect, not as he uses his lamp in the study, only for his own seeing, but as the lighthouse uses its lamps, that those afar off on the sea may see the shining, and learn their way.
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
Topics: Liberty, America, Democracy

It is a higher exhibition of Christian manliness to be able to bear trouble than to get rid of it.
Henry Ward Beecher

If a man can have only one kind of sense, let him have common sense.—If he has that and uncommon sense too, he is not far from genius.
Henry Ward Beecher
Topics: Common Sense

The church has been so fearful of amusements that the devil has had the charge of them; the chaplet of flowers has been snatched from the brow of Christ, and given to Mammon.
Henry Ward Beecher

Any law that takes hold of a mans daily life cannot prevail in a community, unless the vast majority of the community are actively in favor of it. The laws that are the most operative are the laws which protect life.
Henry Ward Beecher

No man can tell whether he is rich or poor by turning to his ledger. 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
Topics: Happiness, Character, Riches, Heart, Money, Wealth, Worth

Good nature is often a mere matter of health.—With good digestion we are apt to be good natured; with bad digestion, morose.
Henry Ward Beecher
Topics: Goodness

An impure man is every good man’s enemy.
Henry Ward Beecher

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
Topics: Wealth

Unless a man can link his written thoughts with the everlasting wants of men, so that they shall draw from them as from wells, there is no more immortality to the thoughts and feelings of the soul than to the muscles and the bones.
Henry Ward Beecher
Topics: Thought

A cunning man overreaches no one half as much as himself.
Henry Ward Beecher
Topics: Cunning

It usually takes a hundred years to make a law, and then, after it has done its work, it usually takes another hundred years to get rid of it.
Henry Ward Beecher
Topics: Laws

Conceited men are a harmless kind of creatures, who, by their overweening self-respect, relieve others from the duty of respecting them at all.
Henry Ward Beecher
Topics: Self-Esteem, Conceit

Morality without religion has no roots.—It becomes a thing of custom, changeable, transient, and optional.
Henry Ward Beecher
Topics: Morality

Pride slays thanksgiving, but an humble mind is the soil out of which thanks naturally grow. A proud man is seldom a grateful man, for he never thinks he gets as much as he deserves.
Henry Ward Beecher
Topics: Gratitude, Thankfulness, Pride, Humility

Of all earthly music that which reaches farthest into heaven is the beating of a truly loving heart.
Henry Ward Beecher
Topics: Love, Affection

All men are tempted. There is no man that lives that can’t be broken down, provided it is the right temptation, put in the right spot.
Henry Ward Beecher
Topics: Self-Control

Repentance may begin, instantly, but reformation often requires a sphere of years.
Henry Ward Beecher
Topics: Repentance

All the sobriety religion needs or requires is that which real earnestness produces.—When men say “be sober,” they usually mean “be stupid.”—When the Bible says “be sober,” it means “rouse up to the earnestness and vivacity of life.”—The old scriptural sobriety was effectual doing; ascetic sobriety is effectual dullness.
Henry Ward Beecher

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