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When God wanted sponges and oysters, He made them and put one on a rock and the other in the mud. When He made man, He did not make him to be a sponge or an oyster; He made him with feet and hands, and head and heart, and vital blood, and a place to use them, and He said to him, Go Work.

— Henry Ward Beecher Royal Truths (1862)

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More quotes by Henry Ward Beecher

The call to religion is not a call to be better than your fellows, but to be better than yourself.

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When laws, customs, or institutions cease to be beneficial to man, they cease to be obligatory.

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He is the human owl, vigilant in darkness and blind to light, mousing for vermin, and never seeing noble game.

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Flowers are the sweetest things that God ever made, and forgot to put a soul into.

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There is no such thing as preaching patience into people, unless the sermon is so long that they have to practise it while they hear.

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All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.

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When we see a great man desiring power instead of his real goal we soon recognize that he is sick, or more precisely that his attitude to his work is sick.

Martin Buber What is Man? (1938)

The fact is the sweetest dream that labor knows.

Robert Frost A Boy's Will (1913)

In a society such as ours, it is almost impossible for a person to be responsible.

Jacques Ellul The Betrayal by Technology (1993)

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Henry Ward Beecher (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.