Henry Ward Beecher Quotes About Past

• Every man should be born again on the first day of January. Start with a fresh page. Take up one hole more in the buckle if necessary, or let down one, according to circumstances; but on the first of January let every man gird himself once more, with his face to the front, and take no interest in the things that were and are past.

  Henry Ward Beecher

  Inspirational, Happiness, New Year

• What we call wisdom is the result of all the wisdom of past ages. Our best institutions are like young trees growing upon the roots of the old trunks that have crumbled away.

  Henry Ward Beecher

  Past, Roots, Tree

  Henry Ward Beecher (1858). “Life Thoughts”, p.98

• A man is a fool who sits looking backward from himself in the past. Ah, what shallow, vain conceit there is in man! Forget the things that are behind. That is not where you live. Your roots are not there. They are in the present; and you should reach up into the other life.

  Henry Ward Beecher

  Past, Men, Roots

• Every green thing loves to die in bright colors. The vegetable cohorts march glowing out of the year in flaming dresses, as if to leave this earth were a triumph and not a sadness. It is never nature that is sad, but only we, that dare not look back on the past, and that have not its prophecy of the future in our bosoms.

  Henry Ward Beecher

  Sadness, Past, Glowing

  Henry Ward Beecher (1855). “Star papers; or, Experiences of art and nature”, p.183

• Next to the pastoral came the agricultural life. When you add to that the manufacturing phase of development, society begins to fill out, and needs but wings to fly, and commerce is its wings.

  Henry Ward Beecher

  Past, Wings, Development

• What we call wisdom is the result of all the wisdom of past ages.

  Henry Ward Beecher

  Past, Age, Results

  Henry Ward Beecher (1858). “Life Thoughts”, p.98

• Troubles loom up big when they're ahead, And joys seem always sweeter when they're past.

  Henry Ward Beecher

  Past, Joy, Trouble

• But there have been human hearts, constituted just like ours, for six thousand years. The same stars rise and set upon this globe that rose upon the plains of Shinar or along the Egyptian Nile and the same sorrows rise and set in every age.

  Henry Ward Beecher

  Stars, Heart, Past

  Henry Ward Beecher (1858). “Life Thoughts”, p.9

• There have been many men who left behind them that which hundreds of years have not worn out. The earth has Socrates and Plato to this day. The world is richer yet by Moses and the old prophets than by the wisest statesmen. We are indebted to the past. We stand in the greatness of ages that are gone rather than in that of our own. But of how many of us shall it be said that, being dead, we yet speak?

  Henry Ward Beecher

  Plato, Greatness, Men

  Henry Ward Beecher (1866). “Royal Truths”, p.87

• There is nothing that is so wonderfully created as the human soul. There is something of God in it. We are infinite in the future, though we are finite in the past.

  Henry Ward Beecher

  Past, Soul, Infinite

  Henry Ward Beecher, Truman Jeremiah Ellinwood (1872). “The Original Plymouth Pulpit: Sermons of Henry Ward Beecher in Plymouth Church, Brooklyn”, p.169

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