Henry Ward Beecher

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

Joy is more divine than sorrow, for joy is bread and sorrow is medicine.

Good nature is worth more than knowledge, more than money, more than honor, to the persons who possess it.

If there's a job to be done, I always ask the busiest man in my parish to take it on and it gets done.

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.

Every city should make the common school so rich, so large, so ample, so beautiful in its endowments, and so fruitful in its results, that a private school will not be able to live under the drip of it.

In engineering, that only is great which achieves. It matters not what the intention is, he who in the day of battle is not victorious is not saved by his intention.

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.

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

Doctrine is nothing but the skin of truth set up and stuffed.

Thinking cannot be clear until it has had expression-we must write, or speak, or act our thoughts, or they will remain in half torpid form. Our feelings must have expression, or they will be as clouds, which, till they descend in rain, will never bring up fruit or flowers. So it is with all the inward feelings; expression gives them development-thought is the blossom; language is the opening bud; action the fruit behind it.

Memory can glean, but can never renew. It brings us joys faint as is the perfume of the flowers, faded and dried, of the summer that is gone.

Home should be an oratorio of the memory, singing to all our after life melodies and harmonies of old-remembered joy.

The glory of Christianity is to conquer by forgiveness. It is easier to forgive an enemy than to forgive a friend.

Do not be afraid of defeat. You are never so near victory as when you are defeated in a good cause.

The newspaper is a greater treasure to the people than uncounted millions of gold.

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.

There is no faculty of the human soul so persistent and universal as that of hatred.

There are apartments in the soul which have a glorious outlook; from whose windows you can see across the river of death, and into the shining city beyond; but how often are these neglected for the lower ones, which have earthward-looking windows.

He is rich or poor according to what he is, not according to what he has.

Children are the hands by which we take hold of heaven.