Henry Ward Beecher Quotes

We really can't boil a man's life down to seasonal divisions of spring, summer, autumn, and winter. Seasons cycle perennially, and we enjoy them because they recur. We should understand a man's life this way too. An elderly person may yet see new springs and summers. On the other hand, some young people never escape winter. Others become ensnared by their own private autumns.

Development comes from within. Nature does not hurry but advances slowly.

Sometimes I attract roles that are necessary either for personal growth or enlightenment.

As long as habit and routine dictate the pattern of living, new dimensions of the soul will not emerge.

I wasn't perfect, although during the '60s, I may have appeared to be. After all, I was partying away there for awhile. From age 17 to 25, I worked only on the outer man, and I did pretty well, but I needed to go back and work on the inside.

My journey was a very organic journey.

Living is being born slowly. It would be a little too easy if we could borrow ready-made souls.

Every moment and every event of everyman's life on earth plants something in his soul. For just as the wind carries thousands of winged seeds, so each moment brings with it germs of spiritual vitality that come to rest imperceptibly in the minds and wills of men.

The growth of the soul may be compared to the growth of a plant. In both cases, no new properties are imparted by the operation of external causes, but only the inward tendencies are called into action and clothed with strength.

A human being is like a seed. Either you can keep it as it is, or you can make it grow into a wonderful tree with flowers and fruits.

Tears are the softening showers which cause the seed of heaven to spring up in the human heart.

The inmost in due time becomes the outmost.

The journey toward self-discovery is life's greatest adventure.

Everyone goes through their winters and springs, and their summers and autumns.

In my heart I mean well. But if you help me to grow, then what I have in my heart will begin to show.

I began to have an idea of my life, not as slow shaping of achievement to fit my preconceived purposes, but as the gradual discovery and growth of a purpose which I did not know.

A man would know the end he goes to, but he cannot know it if he does not turn, and return to his beginning, and hold that beginning in his being. If he would not be a stick whirled and whelmed in the stream, he must be the stream itself, all of it, from its spring to its sinking in the sea.

What we can and should change is ourselves: our impatience, our egoism (including intellectual egoism), our sense of injury, our lack of love and forbearance. I regard every other attempt to change the world, even if it springs from the best intentions, as futile.

I think I try to speak to the heart of the woman who I know is interested in growing into herself.

Men are angels born without wings, nothing could be nicer than to be born without wings and to make them grow.

It is autumn; not without But within me is the cold. Youth and spring are all about; It is I that have grown old.

Self-knowledge is not the knowledge of a dead self, self-knowledge is the knowledge of the process of the self. It is an alive phenomenon. The self is not a thing, it is an event, it is a process. Never think in terms of things, the self is not there inside you just like a thing waiting in your room. The self is a process: changing, moving, arriving at new altitudes, moving into new planes, going deeper into new depths. Each moment much work is going on and the only way to encounter this self is to encounter it in relationship.

Most people live, whether physically, intellectually or morally, in a very restricted circle of their potential being. They make very small use of their possible consciousness, and of their soul's resources in general, much like a man who, out of his whole bodily organism, should get into a habit of using and moving only his little finger.

Far too many people spend a lifetime headed in the wrong direction. They go not only from the cradle to the cubicle, but then to the casket, without uncovering their greatest talents and potential.

Every one, though born of God in an instant, yet undoubtedly grows by slow degrees.