The head learns new things, but the heart forever practices old experiences.
— Henry Ward Beecher
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.
The babe at first feeds upon the mother's bosom, but it is always on her heart.
God appoints our graces to be nurses to other men's weaknesses.
The philosophy of one century is the common sense of the next.
In this world, full often, our joys are only the tender shadows which our sorrows cast.
All ambitions are lawful except those that climb upward on the miseries or credulities of mankind.
The dog is the god of frolic.
To know that one has a secret is to know half the secret itself.
A church debt is the devil's salary.
A book is good company. It is full of conversation without loquacity. It comes to your longing with full instruction, but pursues you never.
It is the heart that makes a man rich. He is rich according to what he is, not according to what he has.
The art of being happy lies in the power of extracting happiness from common things.
You and I do not see things as they are. We see things as we are.
There are three schoolmasters for everybody that will employ them - the senses, intelligent companions, and books.
To array a man's will against his sickness is the supreme art of medicine.
Now comes the mystery.
It's not the work which kills people, it's the worry. It's not the revolution that destroys machinery it's the friction.
Heaven will be inherited by every man who has heaven in his soul.
Next to ingratitude the most painful thing to bear is gratitude.
We should not judge people by their peak of excellence; but by the distance they have traveled from the point where they started.
The ignorant classes are the dangerous classes.
Never forget what a person says to you when they are angry.
The most dangerous people are the ignorant.
Our best successes often come after our greatest disappointments.
If a man cannot be a Christian in the place where he is, he cannot be a Christian anywhere.
The mother's heart is the child's schoolroom.
Every young man would do well to remember that all successful business stands on the foundation of morality.
It is not the going out of port, but the coming in, that determines the success of a voyage.
It is not what we take up, but what we give up, that makes us rich.
It's easier to go down a hill than up it but the view is much better at the top.
Laughter is not a bad beginning for a friendship, and it is the best ending for one.
Of all escape mechanisms, death is the most efficient.
No man is sane who does not know how to be insane on proper occasions.
There is no faculty of the human soul so persistent and universal as that of hatred.
There is no friendship, no love, like that of the parent for the child.
A proud man is seldom a grateful man, for he never thinks he gets as much as he deserves.
Gambling with cards or dice or stocks is all one thing. It's getting money without giving an equivalent for it.
The Church is not a gallery for the exhibition of eminent Christians, but a school for the education of imperfect ones.
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.
We are always on the anvil; by trials God is shaping us for higher things.
The ability to convert ideas to things is the secret of outward success.
He is greatest whose strength carries up the most hearts by the attraction of his own.
Every man should keep a fair-sized cemetery in which to bury the faults of his friends.
Greatness lies, not in being strong, but in the right using of strength; and strength is not used rightly when it serves only to carry a man above his fellows for his own solitary glory. He is the greatest whose strength carries up the most hearts by the attraction of his own.
The sun does not shine for a few trees and flowers, but for the wide world's joy.
The true secret of giving advice is, after you have honestly given it, to be perfectly indifferent whether it is taken or not, and never persist in trying to set people right.
Books are not men and yet they stay alive.
Beware of him who hates the laugh of a child.
We never know the love of a parent till we become parents ourselves.
