Harriet Beecher Stowe Quotes

“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 heart has no tears to give,
it drops only blood, bleeding itself away in silence.”

— 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

The truth is the kindest thing we can give folks in the end.

— 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

“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

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

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

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

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

“Friendships are discovered rather than made.”

— 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

So subtle is the atmosphere of opinion that it will make itself felt without words.

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

“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

“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

“You've always stood it out again' me: now, I'll conquer ye, or kill ye!-one or t' other. I'll count every drop of blood there is in you, and take 'em, one by one, till ye give up!"
Tom looked up to his master, and answered, "Mas'r, if you was sick, or in trouble, or dying, and I could save ye, I'd give ye my heart's blood; and, if taking every drop of blood in this poor old body would save your precious soul, I'd give 'em freely, as the Lord gave his for me. O, Mas'r! don't bring this great sin on your soul! It will hurt you more than 't will me! Do the worst you can, my troubles'll be over soon; but, if ye don't repent, yours won't never end!”

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

“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

“Being an indigenous talent of the African race;”

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

“It was a feeling which he had seen before in his mother; but no chord within vibrated to it.”

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

“The woman did not sob nor weep. She had gone to a place where tears are dry; but every one around her was, in some way characteristic of themselves, showing signs of hearty sympathy.”

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

But who, sir, makes the trader? Who is most to blame? The enlightened, cultivated, intelligent man, who supports the system of which the trader is the inevitable result, or the poor trader himself? You make the public statement that calls for his trade, that debauches and depraves him, till he feels no shame in it; and in what are you better than he?

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

My country!" said George, with a strong and bitter emphasis; "what country have I, but the grave,-and I wish to God that I was laid there!

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

If it comes to that, I can earn myself at least six feet of free soil.

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

“My master! and who made him my master? That's what I think of-what right has he to me? I'm a man as much as he is. I'm a better man than he is.”

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

“He had never thought that a fugitive might be a hapless mother, a defenceless child,-like”

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

“I tell you now, Andy," said Sam, with awful superiority, "don't yer be a talkin' 'bout what yer don't know nothin' on; boys like you, Andy, means well, but they can't be spected to collusitate the great principles of action."
Andy looked rebuked, particularly by the hard word collusitate, which most of the youngerly members of the company seemed to consider as a settler in the case, while Sam proceeded.”

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

“Now, John, I don't know anything about politics, but I can read my Bible; and there I see that I must feed the hungry, clothe the naked, and comfort the desolate; and that Bible I mean to follow.”

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

“The slave is always a tyrant, if he can get a chance to be one.”

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

“Mrs. Bird, seeing the defenseless condition of the enemy's territory, had no more conscience than to push her advantage.”

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

“The sheeted dead
Did squeak and gibber in the streets of Rome.”

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

“The benevolent gentleman is sorry; but, then, the thing happens every day! One sees girls and mothers crying at these sales, always! it can't be helped, etc.; and he walks off, with his acquisition, in another direction.”

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

“No ornament of a house can compare with books; they are constant company in a room, even when you are not reading them.”

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

We should remember in our dealings with animals that they are a sacred trust to us from our Heavenly Father. They are dumb and cannot speak for themselves.

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

“True love ennobles and dignifies the material labors of life; and homely services rendered for love's sake have in them a poetry that is immortal.”

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

“We hear often of the distress of the negro servants, on the loss of a kind master; and with good reason, for no creature on God's earth is left more utterly unprotected and desolate than the slave in these circumstances.”

— 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

“It is one mark of a superior mind to understand and be influenced by the superiority of others.”

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

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

— 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

“Women are the true modelers of social order.”

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

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.

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

“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.”

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

“If I am to write, I must have a room to myself, which shall be my room.”

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

I wrote what I did because as a woman, as a mother, I was oppressed and broken-hearted with the sorrows and injustice I saw, because as a Christian I felt the dishonor to Christianity - because as a lover of my county, I trembled at the coming day of wrath.

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

“At last I have come into a dreamland ...”

— 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

“There are griefs which grow with years.”

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

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.

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

“Intemperance in eating is one of the most fruitful of all causes of disease and death.”

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

“There is no phase of the Italian mind that has not found expression in its music.”

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

People will accept your ideas much more readily if you tell them that Benjamin Franklin said it first. Perhaps it is impossible for a person who does no good to do no harm.

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

“There is no independence and pertinacity of opinion like that of these seemingly soft, quiet creatures, whom it is so easy to silence, and so difficult to convince.”

— Harriet Beecher Stowe