Henry Ward Beecher

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

Of all escape mechanisms, death is the most efficient.

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.

When a nation's young men are conservative, its funeral bell is already rung.

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

Compassion will cure more sins than condemnation.

Where is human nature so weak as in the bookstore?

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

It is not well for a man to pray cream and live skim milk.

No matter what looms ahead, if you can eat today, enjoy today, mix good cheer with friends today enjoy it and bless God for it.

It is not the going out of port, but the coming in, that determines the success of a voyage.

Success is full of promise till one gets it, and then it seems like a nest from which the bird has flown.

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.

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.

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

The real man is one who always finds excuses for others, but never excuses himself.

The dog was created specially for children. He is a god of frolic.

It's not the work which kills people, it's the worry. It's not the revolution that destroys machinery it's the friction.

Every man should keep a fair-sized cemetery in which to bury the faults of his friends.

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