Harriet Beecher Stowe Quotes

164 Sourced Quotes

A true gentleman... was characterized as the man that asks the fewest questions. This trait of refined society might be adopted into home-like in a far greater degree than it is, and make it far more agreeable.

Harriet Beecher Stowe
In the old times, women did not get their lives written, though I don't doubt many of them were much better worth writing than the men's.

Harriet Beecher Stowe
It don't look well, now, for a feller to be praisin' himself; but I say it jest because it's the truth. I believe I'm reckoned to bring in about the finest droves of niggers that is brought in, — at least, I've been told so; if I have once, I reckon I have a hundred times, — all in good case, — fat and likely, and I lose as few as any man in the business. And I lays it all to my management, sir; and humanity, sir, I may say, is the great pillar of my management.

Harriet Beecher Stowe
It would be an incalculable gain to domestic happiness, if people would begin the concert of life with their instruments tuned to a very low pitch: they who receive the most happiness are generally they who demand and expect the least.

Harriet Beecher Stowe
Home is a place not only of strong affections, but of entire unreserve; it is life's undress rehearsal, its backroom, its dressing room, from which we go forth to more careful and guarded intercourse, leaving behind us much debris of cast-off and everyday clothing.

Harriet Beecher Stowe
For, so inconsistent is human nature, especially in the ideal, that not to undertake a thing at all seems better than to undertake and come short.

Harriet Beecher Stowe
I did not write it. God wrote it. I merely did his dictation.

Harriet Beecher Stowe
His conversation was in free and easy defiance of Murray's Grammar, and was garnished at convenient intervals with various profane expressions, which not even the desire to be graphic in our account shall induce us to transcribe.

Harriet Beecher Stowe
Religion! Is what you hear at church religion? Is that which can bend and turn, and descend and ascend, to fit every crooked phase of selfish, worldly society, religion?

Harriet Beecher Stowe
His cravings and dreams were not for somebody to be devoted to, but for somebody to be devoted to him. And, like most people who possess this characteristic, he mistook it for an affectionate disposition.

Harriet Beecher Stowe
Is man ever a creature to be trusted with wholly irresponsible power? And does not the slave system, by denying the slave all legal right of testimony, make every individual owner an irresponsible despot? Can anybody fall to make the inference what the practical result will be? If there is, as we admit, a public sentiment among you, men of honor, justice and humanity, is there not also another kind of public sentiment among the ruffian, the brutal and debased? And cannot the ruffian, the brutal, the debased, by slave law, own just as many slaves as the best and purest? Are the honorable, the just, the high-minded and compassionate, the majority anywhere in this world?

Harriet Beecher Stowe
Life passes, with us all, a day at a time; so it passed with our friend Tom, till two years were gone. Though parted from all his soul held dear, and though often yearning for what lay beyond, still was he never positively and consciously miserable; for, so well is the harp of human feeling strung, that nothing but a crash that breaks every string can wholly mar its harmony; and, on looking back to seasons which in review appear to us as those of deprivation and trial, we can remember that each hour, as it glided, brought its diversions and alleviations, so that, though not happy wholly, we were not, either, wholly miserable.

Harriet Beecher Stowe
The delicacy that respects a friend's silence is one of the charms of life.

Harriet Beecher Stowe
It is always our treasure that the lightning strikes.

Harriet Beecher Stowe
Dogs can bear more cold than human beings, but they do not like cold any better than we do; and when a dog has his choice, he will very gladly stretch himself on a rug before the fire for his afternoon nap.

Harriet Beecher Stowe
A cook she certainly was, in the very bone and centre of her soul. Not a....turkey....in the barn-yard but looked grave when they saw her approaching, and seemed evidently to be reflecting on their latter end; and certain it was that she was always meditating on trussing, stuffing and roasting, to a degree that was calculated to inspire terror in any reflecting fowl living.

Harriet Beecher Stowe
If women want any rights they had better take them, and say nothing about it.

Harriet Beecher Stowe
The beautiful must ever rest in the arms of the sublime. The gentle needs the strong to sustain it, as much as the rock-flowers need rocks to grow on, or the ivy the rugged wall which it embraces.

Harriet Beecher Stowe
So we go, so little knowing what we touch and what touches us as we talk! We drop out a common piece of news, "Mr. So-and-so is dead, Miss Such-a-one is married, such a ship has sailed," and lo, on our right hand or on our left, some heart has sunk under the news silently - gone down in the great ocean of Fate, without even a bubble rising to tell its drowning pang. And this - God help us! - is what we call living!

Harriet Beecher Stowe
It has always been a favorite idea of mine, that there is so much of the human in every man, that the life of any one individual, however obscure, if really and vividly perceived in all its aspirations, struggles, failures, and successes, would command the interest of all others.

Harriet Beecher Stowe
The power of fictitious writing, for good as well as evil is a thing which ought most seriously to be reflected on. No one can fail to see that in our day it is becoming a very great agency.

Harriet Beecher Stowe
What a fool is he who locks his door to keep out spirits, who has in his own bosom a spirit he dares not meet alone; whose voice, smothered far down, and piled over with mountains of earthliness, is yet like the forewarning trumpet of doom!

Harriet Beecher Stowe
We can make ourselves say the kind things that rise in our hearts and tremble on our lips - do the gentle and helpful deeds which we long to do and shrink back from; and little by little, it will grow easier - the love spoken will bring back the answer of love - the kind deed will bring back a kind deed in return.

Harriet Beecher Stowe
It lies around us like a cloud- A world we do not see; Yet the sweet closing of an eye May bring us there to be.

Harriet Beecher Stowe
The human heart yearns for the beautiful in all ranks of life. The beautiful things that God makes are His gift to all alike. I know there are many of the poor who have fine feeling and a keen sense of the beautiful, which rusts out and dies because they are too hard pressed to procure it any gratification.

Harriet Beecher Stowe
These Germans seem an odd race, a mixture of clay and spirit — what with their beer-drinking and smoking, and their slow, stolid ways, you would think them perfectly earth; but ethereal fire is all the while working in them, and bursting out in most unexpected jets of poetry and sentiment, like blossoms on a cactus.

Harriet Beecher Stowe
After all, let a man take what pains he may to hush it down, a human soul is an awful, ghostly, unquiet possession for a bad man to have. Who knows the metes and bounds of it? Who knows all its awful perhapses,--those shudderings and tremblings, which it can no more live down than it can outlive its own eternity?

Harriet Beecher Stowe
Cause I's wicked, - I is. I's mighty wicked, anyhow, I can't help it.

Harriet Beecher Stowe
Witness, eternal God! Oh, witness that, from this hour, I will do what one man can to drive out this curse of slavery from my land!

Harriet Beecher Stowe
One of the greatest reforms that could be, in these reforming days... would be to have women architects. The mischief with the houses built to rent is that they are all male contrivances.

Harriet Beecher Stowe