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We should not judge people by their peak of excellence but by the distance they have traveled from the point where they started.

Henry Ward Beecher

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Henry Ward Beecher
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More quotes by Henry Ward Beecher

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Someone calls biography the home aspect of history.
Henry Ward Beecher
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You have seen a ship out on the bay, swinging with the tide, and seeming as if it would follow it and yet it cannot, for down beneath the water it is anchored. So many a soul sways toward heaven, but cannot ascend thither, because it is anchored to some secret sin.
Henry Ward Beecher
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The methods by which men have met and conquered trouble, or been slain by it, are the same in every age.
Henry Ward Beecher
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The church is no more religion than the masonry of the aqueduct is the water that flows through it.
Henry Ward Beecher
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Religion is using everything for God.
Henry Ward Beecher
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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
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Ambition is the way in which a vulgar man aspires.
Henry Ward Beecher
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Coming to the Bible through commentaries is much like looking at a landscape through garret windows, over which generations of unmolested spiders have spun their webs.
Henry Ward Beecher
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As long as society is absolutely divided as milk is, the cream being at the top and the impoverished milk at the bottom, so long will society be unbalanced, and liable to be thrown into convulsions out of which will spring wars. A circulation throughout keeps it in health.
Henry Ward Beecher
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Human life is God's outer church. Its needs and urgencies are priests and pastors.
Henry Ward Beecher
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Give us that calm certainty of truth, that nearness to Thee, that conviction of the reality of the life to come, which we shall need to bear us through the troubles of this.
Henry Ward Beecher
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Theology is but a science of applied to God. As schools change theology must necessarily change. Truth is everlasting, but our ideas of truth are not. Theology is but our ideas of truth classified and arranged.
Henry Ward Beecher
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Love is the wine of existence. When you have taken that, you have taken the most precious drop that there is in the cluster.
Henry Ward Beecher
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God sends experience to paint men's portraits.
Henry Ward Beecher
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You cannot sift out the poor from the community. The poor are indispensable to the rich.
Henry Ward Beecher
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Pushing any truth out very far, you are met by a counter-truth.
Henry Ward Beecher
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The difference between perseverance and obstinacy is that one comes from a strong will, and the other from a strong won't.
Henry Ward Beecher
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The religion of Jesus Christ is not ascetic, nor sour, nor gloomy, nor circumscribing. It is full of sweetness in the present and in promise.
Henry Ward Beecher
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The beginnings of moral enterprises in this world are never to be measured by any apparent growth. ... At length comes the sudden ripeness and the full success, and he who is called in at the final moment deems this success his own. He is but the reaper and not the labourer. Other men sowed and tilled and he but enters into their labours.
Henry Ward Beecher
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There is no right more universal and more sacred, because lying so near the root of existence, than the right of men to their own labor.
Henry Ward Beecher