Top 192 Quotes & Sayings by Harriet Beecher Stowe - Page 3

I don't know as I am fit for anything and I have thought that I could wish to die young and let the remembrance of me and my faults perish in the grave rather than live, as I fear I do, a trouble to everyone.... Sometimes I could not sleep and have groaned and cried till midnight.

the heaviest anguish often precedes a return tide of joy and courage.

Strange, what brings these past things so vividly back to us, sometimes!

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.

The ship, built on one element, but designed to have its life in another, seemed an image of the soul, formed and fashioned with many a weary hammer-stroke in this life, but finding its true element only when it sails out into the ocean of eternity.

Now, if the principle of toleration were once admitted into classical education - if it were admitted that the great object is to read and enjoy a language, and the stress of the teaching were placed on the few things absolutely essential to this result, if the tortoise were allowed time to creep, and the bird permitted to fly, and the fish to swim, towards the enchanted and divine sources of Helicon - all might in their own way arrive there, and rejoice in its flowers, its beauty, and its coolness.

Everyone confesses in the abstract that exertion which brings out all the powers of body and mind is the best thing for us all; but practically most people do all they can to get rid of it, and as a general rule nobody does much more than circumstances drive them to do.

Friends are discovered rather than made; there are people who are in their own nature friends, only they don't know each other; but certain things, like poetry, music, and paintings are like the Freemason's sign, they reveal the initiated to each other.

The soul awakes ... between two dim eternities - the eternal past, the eternal future.

Sublime is the dominion of the mind over the body, that, for a time, can make flesh and nerve impregnable, and string the sinews like steel, so that the weak become so mighty!

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.

Humankind above all is lazy.

Behold! thou hast one more chance! Strive for immortal glory!

It is always our treasure that the lightning strikes.

The hand of benevolence is everywhere stretched out, searching into abuses, righting wrongs, alleviating distresses, and bringing to the knowledge and sympathies of the world the lowly, the oppressed, and the forgotten.

Cathedrals do not seem to me to have been built. They seem, rather, stupendous growths of nature, like crystals, or cliffs of basalt.

No one is so thoroughly superstitious as the godless man. Life and death to him are haunted grounds, filled with goblin forms of vague and shadowy dread.

What's your hurry?" Because now is the only time there ever is to do a thing in," said Miss Ophelia.

God has always been to me not so much like a father as like a dear and tender mother.

That ignorant confidence in one's self and one's future, which comes in life's first dawn, has a sort of mournful charm in experienced eyes, who know how much it all amounts to.

Sensitive people never like the fatigue of justifying their instincts.

God washes the eyes by tears unil they can behold the invisible land where tears shall come no more.

Women are the true modelers of social order.

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

A little reflection will enable any person to detect in himself that setness in trifles which is the result of the unwatched instinct of self-will and to establish over himself a jealous guardianship.

A ship is a beauty and a mystery wherever we see it.

As oil will find its way into crevices where water cannot penetrate, so song will find its way where speech can no longer enter.

Let my soul calm itself, O Christ, in Thee. This is true.

At last I have come into a dreamland.

Love needs new leaves every summer of life, as much as your elm-tree, and new branches to grow broader and wider, and new flowers to cover the ground.

I b'lieve in religion, and one of these days, when I've got matters tight and snug, I calculates to tend to my soul.

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?

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.

Midnight,--strange mystic hour,--when the veil between the frail present and the eternal future grows thin.

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.

Women's Day Women are the real architects of society.

Death! Strange that there should be such a word, and such a thing, and we ever forget it; that one should be living, warm and beautiful, full of hopes, desires and wants, one day, and the next be gone, utterly gone, and forever!

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.

In lecturing on cookery, as on housebuilding, I divide the subject into, not four, but five grand elements: first, Bread; second,Butter; third, Meat; fourth, Vegetables; and fifth, Tea--by which I mean, generically, all sorts of warm, comfortable drinks served out in teacups, whether they be called tea, coffee, chocolate, broma, or what not. I affirm that, if these five departments are all perfect, the great ends of domestic cookery are answered, so far as the comfort and well-being of life are concerned.

Get your evidences of grace by pressing forward to the mark, and not by groping with a lantern after the boundary lines.

Mothers are the most instinctive philosophers.

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!

the temperaments of children are often as oddly unsuited to parents as if capricious fairies had been filling cradles with changelings.

Can anybody tell what sorrows are locked up with our best affections, or what pain may be associated with every pleasure?

the delicacy that respects a friend's silence is one of the charms of life.

O, because I have had only that kind of benevolence which consists in lying on a sofa, and cursing the church and clergy for not being martyrs and confessors. One can see, you know, very easily, how others ought to be martyrs.

Nobody had ever instructed him that a slave-ship, with a procession of expectant sharks in its wake, is a missionary institution, by which closely-packed heathen are brought over to enjoy the light of the Gospel.

The number of those men who know how to use wholly irresponsible power humanely and generously is small. Everybody knows this, and the slave knows it best of all.

'Who was your mother?' 'Never had none!' said the child, with another grin. 'Never had any mother? What do you mean? Where were you born?' 'Never was born!' 'Do you know who made you?' 'Nobody, as I knows on,' said the child, with a short laugh. . . . 'I 'spect I grow'd.'

A day of grace is yet held out to us. Both North and South have been guilty before God; and the Christian Church has a heavy account to answer. Not by combining together, to protest injustice and cruelty, and making a common capital of sin, is this Union to be saved-but by repentance, justice and mercy; for, not surer is the eternal law by which the millstone sinks in the ocean, than that stronger law, by which injustice and cruelty shall bring on nations the wrath of Almighty God.

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?

Mountains are nature's testimonials of anguish. They are the sharp cry of a groaning and travailing creation. Nature's stern agony writes itself on these furrowed brows of gloomy stone. These reft and splintered crags stand, the dreary images of patient sorrow, existing verdureless and stern because exist they must.

Gems, in fact, are a species of mineral flowers; they are the blossoms of the dark, hard mine; and what they want in perfume, they make up in durability.

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.

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

in America, far too large a portion of the diet consists of animal food. As a nation, the Americans are proverbial for the gross and luxurious diet with which they load their tables; and there can be no doubt that the general health of the nation would be increased by a change in our customs in this respect.

Rome is an astonishment!

Children will grow up substantially what they are by nature--and only that.

Just so sure as one puts on any old rag, and thinks nobody will come, company is sure to call.

I honestly do not know if civil disobedience has any effect on the government. I can promise you it has a great effect on the person who chooses to do it. Martin Sheen The burning of rebellious thoughts in the little breast, of internal hatred and opposition, could not long go on without slight whiffs of external smoke, such as mark the course of subterranean fire.