Harriet Beecher Stowe Quotes

Eyes that have never wept cannot comprehend sorrow.

Scenes of blood and cruelty are shocking to our ear and heart. What man has nerve to do, man has not nerve to hear.

Humankind above all is lazy.

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.

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.

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!

Whipping and abuse are like laudanum: you have to double the dose as the sensibilities decline.

Any mind that is capable of real sorrow is capable of good.

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.

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?

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.

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.

The same quickness which makes a mind buoyant in gladness often makes it gentlest and most sympathetic in sorrow.

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

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.

The world has been busy for some centuries in shutting and locking every door through which a woman could step into wealth, except the door of marriage.

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.

There is a great life-giving, warming power called Love, which exists in human hearts dumb and unseen, but which has no real life, no warming power, till set free by expression.

Money is a great help everywhere; - can't have too much, if you get it honestly.

If you destroy delicacy and a sense of shame in a young girl, you deprave her very fast.

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.

It is always our treasure that the lightning strikes.

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!

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.

Most mothers are instinctive philosophers.

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.

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

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!

When you get into a tight place, and everything goes against you till it seems as if you could n't hold on a minute longer, never give up then, for that 's just the place and time that the tide'll turn.

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.

The person who decides what shall be the food and drink of a family, and the modes of its preparation, is the one who decides, to a greater or less extent, what shall be the health of that family.

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!

Love is very beautiful, but very, very sad.

No one is so thoroughly superstitious as the godless man.

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.

Sweet souls around us watch us still, press nearer to our side; Into our thoughts, into our prayers, with gentle helpings glide.

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

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

Rome is an astonishment!

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

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

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.

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

There is more done with pens than with swords.

My vocation to preach on paper.

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

So much has been said and sung of beautiful young girls, why doesn't somebody wake up to the beauty of old women.

Where painting is weakest, namely, in the expression of the highest moral and spiritual ideas, there music is sublimely strong.