Henry Ward Beecher Quotes

I believe I am not mistaken in saying that Christianity is a demanding and serious religion. When it is delivered as easy and amusing, it is another kind of religion altogether.

I am a Catholic. As far as possible I go to Mass every day. As far as possible I kneel down and tell these beads every day. If you reject me on account of my religion, I shall thank God that he has spared me the indignity of being your representative.

My parents used to say faith wasn't something you could pretend about. It wasn't real unless it looked like faith and acted like faith.

Went to church and fasted all day.

Abstinence is many times very helpful to the end of religion.

Sincerity is the foundation of the spiritual life.

Religion is the most gentlemanly thing in the world. It alone will gentilize, if unmixed with cant.

Hypocrisy is fatal to religion.

Religion, if it is genuine, is so profoundly interwoven with individual thought and experience that it is no more exhaustible than consciousness itself. And fiction whose purpose is didactic is bad no matter whether the matter to be "taught" is Christianity or the world view of Ayn Rand. It seems often to be assumed by writers that religion is a pose, meant to deceive oneself or others, or that it is a bad patch on doubt or complexity. This is only convention, however. The writers I know have a much deeper engagement with the real issues of religion.

Preaching means to awaken the real inclination to serve God.

Faith is the fountain, the foundation and the fosterer of obedience.

Religion, in one sense, is a life of self-denial, just as husbandry, in one sense, is a work of death.

Many people have just enough natural religion to make them immune to the real thing.

Jesus and spirituality can easily become therapies that merely help us cope with life. They can serve us if we chose Him over other service providers. We even talk about "making Jesus my personal Lord and Savior," as if we could make Him anything!

Such self-denial 'may appear demanding,' but it will allow you, so to speak, to be and to breathe within the heart of the church.

To keep a faith pure, man had better retire to a monastery.

The real test of any church or religion is the kind of men it makes.

If I should neglect prayer but a single day, I should lose a great deal of the fire of faith.

I'm a Roman Catholic! A devout Roman Catholic.

If I can be serious now, and I have the feeling I can.

Religion must always be a crab fruit; it cannot be grafted, and keep its wild beauty.

Religion should be dearer than life itself.

[Religion is a way of reconstructing] what has come to feel like a crumbling moral framework in the life of our nation.

Faith makes blessed. Consequently it lies.

Seeing & savoring Jesus Christ is the most important seeing and savoring you'll ever do.