Harriet Beecher Stowe > Quotes

“The longest way must have its close - the gloomiest night will wear on to a morning.”
― Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin

“Of course, in a novel, people's hearts break, and they die and that is the end of it; and in a story this is very convenient. But in real life we do not die when all that makes life bright dies to us.”
― Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin

“When you get into a tight place and everything goes against you until it seems that you cannot hold on for a minute longer, never give up then, for that is just the place and time when the tide will turn.”
― Harriet Beecher Stowe

“The bitterest tears shed over graves are for words left unsaid and deeds left undone.”
― Harriet Beecher Stowe

“Once in an age God sends to some of us a friend who loves in us, not a false-imagining, an unreal character, but looking through the rubbish of our imperfections, loves in us the divine ideal of our nature,--loves, not the man that we are, but the angel that we may be.”
― Harriet Beecher Stowe

“Of course, in a novel, people’s hearts break, and they die, and that is the end of it; and in a story this is very convenient. But in real life we do not die when all that makes life bright dies to us. There is a most busy and important round of eating, drinking, dressing, walking, visiting, buying, selling, talking, reading, and all that makes up what is commonly called living, yet to be gone through…”
― Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin

“There are in this world blessed souls, whose sorrows all spring up into joys for others; whose earthly hopes, laid in the grave with many tears, are the seed from which spring healing flowers and balm for the desolate and the distressed.”
― Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin

“Common sense is seeing things as they are; and doing things as they ought to be.”
― Harriet Beecher Stowe

“So much has been said and sung of beautiful young girls, why don't somebody wake up to the beauty of old women?”
― Harriet Beecher Stowe

“The truth is the kindest thing we can give folks in the end.”
― Harriet Beecher Stowe

“...the heart has no tears to give,--it drops only blood, bleeding itself away in silence.”
― Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin

“It's a matter of taking the side of the weak against the strong, something the best people have always done.”
― Harriet Beecher Stowe

“Never give up, for that is just the place and time that the tide will turn.”
― Harriet Beecher Stowe

“Treat 'em like dogs, and you'll have dogs' works and dogs' actions. Treat 'em like men, and you'll have men's works.”
― Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin

“The longest day must have its close — the gloomiest night will wear on to a morning. An eternal, inexorable lapse of moments is ever hurrying the day of the evil to an eternal night, and the night of the just to an eternal day.”
― Harriet Beecher Stowe

“Most mothers are instinctive philosophers.”
― Harriet Beecher Stowe

“To be really great in little things, to be truly noble and heroic in the insipid details of everyday life, is a virtue so rare as to be worthy of canonization.”
― Harriet Beecher Stowe

“Perhaps it is impossible for a person who does no good not to do harm.”
― Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin

“For how imperiously, how coolly, in disregard of all one’s feelings, does the hard, cold, uninteresting course of daily realities move on! Still we must eat, and drink, and sleep, and wake again, - still bargain, buy, sell, ask and answer questions, - pursue, in short, a thousand shadows, though all interest in them be over; the cold, mechanical habit of living remaining, after all vital interest in it has fled.”
― Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin

“What's your hurry?"
Because now is the only time there ever is to do a thing in," said Miss Ophelia.”
― Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin

“It was the first time that ever George had sat down on equal terms at any white man's table; and he sat down, at first, with some constraint, and awkwardness; but they all exhaled and went off like fog, in the genial morning rays of this simple overflowing kindness.

This indeed, was a home, - home, -a word that George had never yet known a meaning for; and a belief in God, and trust in His providence, began to encircle his heart, as, with a golden cloud of protection and confidence, dark, misanthropic, pining, atheistic doubts, and fierce despair, melted away before the light of a living Gospel, breathed in living faces, preached by a thousand unconscious acts of love and good-will, which, like the cup of cold water given in the name of a disciple, shall never lose their reward.”
― Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin

“So subtle is the atmosphere of opinion that it will make itself felt without words.”
― 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, Uncle Tom's Cabin

“I am speaking now of the highest duty we owe our friends, the noblest, the most sacred--that of keeping their own nobleness, goodness, pure and incorrupt...If we let our friend become cold and selfish and exacting without remonstrance, we are no true lover, no true friend.”
― Harriet Beecher Stowe

“In all ranks of life the human heart yearns for the beautiful; and the beautiful things that God makes are His gift to all alike.”
― Harriet Beecher Stowe

“When you get into a tight place and everything goes against you, till it seems as though you could not hold on a minute longer, never give up then, for that is just the place and time that the tide will turn”
― Harriet Beecher Stowe

“Let us resolve: First, to attain the grace of silence; second, to deem all fault finding that does no good a sin; third, to practice the grade and virtue of praise.”
― Harriet Beecher Stowe

“Humankind above all is lazy.”
― Harriet Beecher Stowe

“Talk of the abuses of slavery! Humbug! The thing itself is the essence of all abuse!”
― Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin

“It is generally understood that men don't aspire after the absolute right, but only to do about as well as the rest of the world.”
― Harriet Beecher Stowe

“Strange, what brings these past things so vividly back to us, sometimes!”
― Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin

“Women are the real architects of society.”
― Harriet Beecher Stowe

“What is it that sometimes speaks in the soul so calmly, so clearly, that its earthly time is short? Is it the secret instinct of decaying nature, or the soul's impulsive throb, as immortality draws on? Be what it may, it rested in the heart of Eva, a calm, sweet, prophetic certainty that Heaven was near; calm as the light of sunset, sweet as the bright stillness of autumn, there her little heart reposed, only troubled by sorrow for those who loved her so dearly.”
― Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin

“I am one of the sort that lives by throwing stones at other people's
glass houses, but I never mean to put up one for them to stone.”
― Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin

“Once in an age, God sends to some of us a friend who loves in us... not the person that we are, But the angel we may be.”
― 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? Is that religion which is less scrupulous, less generous, less just, less considerate for man, than even my own ungodly, worldly, blinded nature? No! When I look for religion, I must look for something above me, and not something beneath.”
― Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin

“Any mind that is capable of a real sorrow is capable of good.”
― Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin

“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!”
― Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin

“Scenes of blood and cruelty are shocking to our ear and heart. What man has nerve to do, man has not nerve to hear.”
― Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin

“It takes years and maturity to make the discovery that the power of faith is nobler than the power of doubt; and that there is a celestial wisdom in the ingenuous propensity to trust, which belongs to honest and noble natures.”
― Harriet Beecher Stowe, The Pearl of Orr's Island: A Story of the Coast of Maine

“But, of old, there was One whose suffering changed an instrument of torture, degradation and shame, into a symbol of glory, honor, and immortal life; and, where His spirit is, neither degrading stripes, nor blood, nor insults, can make the Christian's last struggle less than glorious.”
― Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin

“But it is often those who have least of all in this life whom He chooseth for the kingdom. Put thy trust in Him and no matter what befalls thee here, He will make all right hereafter.”
― Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin

“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.
-Augustine St. Clare”
― Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin

“...for twenty years or more, nothing but loving words, and gentle moralities, and motherly loving kindness, had come from that chair;--headaches and heartaches innumerable had been cured there,--difficulties spritual and temporal solved there,--all by one good, loving woman, God bless her!”
― Harriet Beecher Stowe

“If ever you have had a romantic, uncalculating friendship, - a boundless worship and belief in some hero of your soul, - if ever you have so loved, that all cold prudence, all selfish worldly considerations have gone down like drift-wood before a river flooded with new rain from heaven, so that you even forgot yourself, and were ready to cast your whole being into the chasm of existence, as an offering before the feet of another, and all for nothing, - if you awoke bitterly betrayed and deceived, still give thanks to God that you have had one glimpse of heaven. The door now shut will open again. Rejoice that the noblest capability of your eternal inheritance has been made known to you; treasure it, as the highest honor of your being, that ever you could so feel, -that so divine a guest ever possessed your soul.”
― Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin

“Have not many of us, in the weary way of life, felt, in some hours, how far easier it were to die than to live?
The martyr, when faced even by a death of bodily anguish and horror, finds in the very terror of his doom a strong stimulant and tonic. There is a vivid excitement, a thrill and fervor, which may carry through any crisis of suffering that is the birth-hour of eternal glory and rest.
But to live, to wear on, day after day, of mean, bitter, low, harassing servitude, every nerve dampened and depressed, every power of feeling gradually smothered, this long and wasting heart-martyrdom, this slow, daily bleeding away of the inward life, drop by drop, hour after hour, this is the true searching test of what there may be in man or woman.”
― Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin

“In how many families do you hear the legend that all the goodness and graces of the living are nothing to the peculiar charms of one who is not. It is as if heaven had an especial band of angels, whose office it was to sojourn for a season here, and endear to them the wayward human heart, that they might bear it upward with them in their homewoard flight. When you see that deep, spiritual light in the eye,---when the little soul reveals itself in words sweeter and wiser than the ordinary words of children,---hope not to retain that child, for the seal of heaven is on it, and the light of immortality looks out from its eyes.”
― Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin

“The power of fictitious writing, for good as well as for evil, is a thing which ought most seriously to be reflected upon.”
― Harriet Beecher Stowe

“But now what? Why, now comes my master, takes me right away from my work, and my friends, and all I like, and grinds me down into the very dirt! And why? Because, he says, I forgot who I was; he says, to teach me that I am only a nigger! After all, and last of all, he comes between me and my wife, and says I shall give her up, and live with another woman. And all this your laws give him power to do, in spite of God or man. Mr. Wilson, look at it! There isn't one of all these things, that have broken the hearts of my mother and my sister, and my wife and myself, but your laws allow, and give every man power to do, in Kentucky, and none can say to him nay! Do you call these the laws of my country? Sir, I haven't any country, anymore than I have any father. But I'm going to have one. I don't want anything of your country, except to be let alone,--to go peaceably out of it; and when I get to Canada, where the laws will own me and protect me, that shall be my country, and its laws I will obey. But if any man tries to stop me, let him take care, for I am desperate. I'll fight for my liberty to the last breath I breathe. You say your fathers did it; if it was right for them, it is right for me!”
― Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin

“The underlying foundation of life in New England was one of profound, unutterable, and therefore unuttered, melancholy, which regarded human existence itself as a ghastly risk, and, in the case of the vast majority of human beings, an inconceivable misfortune.”
― Harriet Beecher Stowe, Oldtown Folks