Frances Harper Quotes

41 Sourced Quotes

Amid ancient lore the Word of God stands unique and pre-eminent. Wonderful in its construction, admirable in its adaptation, it contains truths that a child may comprehend, and mysteries into which angels desire to look.

Frances Harper
Heard you that shriek? It rose
So wildly on the air,
It seemed as if a burden'd heart
Was breaking in despair.

Frances Harper
Let me make the songs for the people,
Songs for the old and young;
Songs to stir like a battle-cry
Wherever they are sung.

Frances Harper
We are all bound up together in one great bundle of humanity, and society cannot trample on the weakest and feeblest of its members without receiving the curse in its own soul.

Frances Harper
Men grow strong in action, but in solitude
Their thoughts are ripened.

Frances Harper
Sorrow treads on the footsteps of the nation's joy.... Let the whole nation resolve that the whole virus shall be eliminated from its body; that in the future slavery shall only be remembered as a thing of the past that shall never have the faintest hope of a resurrection.

Frances Harper
I have seen the ocean singing its wild chorus of sounding waves, and ecstasy has thrilled upon the living chords of my heart. I have since then seen the rainbow-crowned Niagara... chanting the choral hymn of Omnipotence, girdled with grandeur, and robed with glory; but none of these things have melted me as the first sight of Free Land.

Frances Harper
The most important question before us colored people is not simply what the Democratic party may do against us or the Republican party do for us; but what are we going to do for ourselves?

Frances Harper
I am not despondent to the future of my people; there's too much elasticity in their spirits, too much hope in their hearts, to be crushed out by unreasoning malice.

Frances Harper
Apparent failure may hold in its rough shell the germs of a success that will blossom in time, and bear fruit throughout eternity.

Frances Harper
You white women speak here of rights. I speak of wrongs. I as a colored woman have had in this country an education which has made me feel as if I were in the situation of Ishmael, my hands against every man, and every man's hand against me.

Frances Harper
I like the character of Moses. He is the first disunionist we read of in the Jewish Scriptures.

Frances Harper
What hath God wrought!... In the crucible of disaster and defeat God has stirred the nation, and permitted no permanent victory to crown her banners while she kept her hand upon the trembling slave and held him back from freedom.

Frances Harper
Our heart may grow more hopeful for humanity when it sees the sublime sacrifice it is about to receive from his hands. Not in vain has your dear husband periled all, if the martyrdom of one hero is worth more than the life of a million cowards.

Frances Harper
But two things are wanting in American civilization - a keener and deeper, broader and tenderer sense of justice - a sense of humanity, which shall crystallize into the life of a nation the sentiment that justice, simple justice, is the right, not simply of the strong and powerful, but of the weakest and feeblest of all God's children...

Frances Harper
Our fault in a land of Bibles and churches, of baptisms and prayers, is that in our veins flows the blood of an outcast race; a race oppressed by power and proscribed by prejudice, a race cradled in wrong and nurtured in oppression.

Frances Harper
On my people's blighted bosom
Mountain weights of sorrow lay,
Stop not now to ask the question
Who shall roll the stone away?

Frances Harper
It is easier to outgrow the dishonor of crime than the disabilities of color.

Frances Harper
From the crimson sods of war springs the white flower of freedom, and songs of deliverance mingle with the crash and roar of war. The shadow of the American army becomes a covert for the slave, and beneath the American Eagle he grasps the key of knowledge and is lifted to a higher destiny.

Frances Harper
The true aim of female education should be, not a development of one or two, but all the faculties of the human soul, because no perfect womanhood is developed by imperfect culture.

Frances Harper
What's the use of praying for a thing, if when it comes, you won't take it?

Frances Harper
True politeness is to social life what oil is to machinery, a thing to oil the ruts and grooves of existence. False politeness can shine without warming and glitter without vivifying.

Frances Harper
If we have had no past, it is well for us to look hopefully to the future — for the shadows bear the promise of a brighter coming day...

Frances Harper
Now is the time for our women to begin to try to lift up their heads and plant the roots of progress under the hearthstone.

Frances Harper
A woman who could bend to grief,
But would not bow to shame.

Frances Harper
And what is wrong in woman's life
In man's cannot be right.

Frances Harper
Though the morning seems to linger
O'er the hill-tops far away,
Yet the shadows bear the promise
Of a brighter coming day.

Frances Harper
His side had won the day,
Had not we women radicals
Just got right in the way.

Frances Harper
He is not dead! he only left
A precious robe of clay behind,
To draw a robe of love and light
Around his disembodied mind.

Frances Harper
I belong to this race, and when it is down I belong to a down race; when it is up I belong to a risen race.

Frances Harper