Henry Ward BeecherThinkers

Anger is a necessary facet of the ethical human being. A man who does not know how to be angry does not know how to be good.

Anger is, when unexpressed, like a stream that cannot overflow and is always turbid. Indignation is sometimes as good as a thunderstorm in summer, clearing and cooling the air.

The Artist is pictures.

The Book is a good companion that comes to your longing with full instruction, but pursues you never.

The City is a place of so much competition, so much rivalry, so much necessity for industry, that it is a perpetual, chronic, wholesale violation of natural law in which no more than one in ten men can succeed.

The Cynic is one who never sees a good quality in a man, and never fails to see a bad one. He is the human owl, vigilant in darkness and blind to light, mousing for vermin, and never seeing noble game.

Cynicism is an approach toward life that puts all human actions into two classes openly bad and secretly bad.

Death is the most efficient of all escape mechanisms.

Difficulty is the oft-used tool by which God fashions us for better things.

Imagination is that without which the soul is like an observatory without a telescope.

Joy is a thing without which a man is like a wagon without springs, causing him disagreeably to jolt by every pebble over which it turns.