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A dull axe never loves grindstones, but a keen workman does and he puts his tool on them in order that it may be sharp. And men do not like grinding but they are dull for the purposes which God designs to work out with them, and therefore He is grinding them.

Henry Ward Beecher

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Henry Ward Beecher
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More quotes by Henry Ward Beecher

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Death is the Christian's vacation morning. School is out. It is time to go home.
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Morality is character and conduct such as is required by the circle or community in which the man's life happens to be placed. It shows how much good men require of us.
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Children are the hands by which we take hold of heaven. By these tendrils we clasp it and climb thitherward. And why do we think that we are separated from them? We never half knew them, nor in this world could.
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There is no greater crime than to stand between a man and his development to take any law or institution and put it around him like a collar, and fasten it there, so that as he grows and enlarges, he presses against it till he suffocates and dies.
Henry Ward Beecher
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You can imagine thistle-down so light that when you run after it your running motion would drive it away from you, and that the more you tried to catch it the faster it would fly from your grasp. And it should be with every man, that, when he is chased by troubles, they, chasing, shall raise him higher and higher.
Henry Ward Beecher
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Self-denial does not belong to religion as characteristic of it it belongs to human life the lower nature must always be denied when you are trying to rise to a higher sphere.
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A man should fear when he only enjoys what good he does publicly. Is it not the publicity rather than the charity he loves? Is it not vanity, rather than benevolence, that gives such charities?
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That energy which makes a child hard to manage is the energy which afterwards makes him a manager of life.
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Our yearnings are homesicknesses for heaven our sighings are for God, just as children that cry themselves asleep away from home, and sob in their slumber, know not that they sob for their parents. The soul's inarticulate moanings are the affections yearning for the Infinite, and having no one to tell them what it is that ails them.
Henry Ward Beecher
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Men are not put into this world to be everlastingly played on by the harping fingers of joy.
Henry Ward Beecher
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He who is false to present duty breaks a thread in the loom, and will find the flaw when he may have forgotten its cause.
Henry Ward Beecher
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The most dangerous people are the ignorant.
Henry Ward Beecher
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Some men are like pyramids, which are very broad where they touch the ground, but grow narrow as they reach the sky.
Henry Ward Beecher
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There are many persons who look on Sunday as a sponge to wipe out the sins of the week
Henry Ward Beecher
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Our life is but a new form of the way men have lived from the beginning.
Henry Ward Beecher
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Be a hard master to yourself - and be lenient to everybody else.
Henry Ward Beecher
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O never harm the dreaming world, the world of green, the world of leaves, but let its million palms unfold the adoration of the trees Of all man's works of art, a cathedral is greatest. A vast and majestic tree is greater than that.
Henry Ward Beecher
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As ships meet at sea a moment together, when words of greeting must be spoken, and then away upon the deep, so men meet in this world and I think we should cross no man's path without hailing him, and if he needs giving him supplies.
Henry Ward Beecher
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Most of the debts of Europe represent condensed drops of blood.
Henry Ward Beecher
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Nothing can be further apart than true humility and servility.
Henry Ward Beecher