Harriet Beecher Stowe Quotes

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.

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.

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?

General rules will bear hard on particular cases.

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.

I 'spect I growed. Don't think nobody never made me.

Human nature is above all things lazy.

There are in this world two kinds of natures, - those that have wings, and those that have feet, - the winged and the walking spirits. The walking are the logicians; the winged are the instinctive and poetic.

Treat 'em like dogs, and you'll have dogs' works and dogs' actions. Treat 'em like men, and you'll have men's works.

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

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.

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.

Never give up, for that is just the place and time that the tide will turn.

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.

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

One part of the science of living is to learn just what our own responsibility is, and to let other people's alone.

the Lord gives good many things twice over; but he don't give ye a mother but once.

O, what an untold world there is in one human heart!

he who has nothing to lose can afford all risks.

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

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

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.

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

it isn't mere love and good-will that is needed in a sick-room; it needs knowledge and experience.

intemperance in eating is one of the most fruitful of all causes of disease and death.

A man builds a house in England with the expectation of living in it and leaving it to his children; while we shed our houses in America as easily as a snail does his shell. We live a while in Boston, and then a while in New York, and then, perhaps, turn up at Cincinnati. Scarcely any body with us is living where they expect to live and die. The man that dies in the house he was born in is a wonder. There is something pleasant in the permanence and repose of the English family estate, which we, in America, know very little of.

I make no manner of doubt that you threw a very diamond of truth at me, though you see it hit me so directly in the face that it wasn't exactly appreciated, at first.

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

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.

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.

If you were not already my dearly loved husband I should certainly fall in love with you.

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.

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

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.

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 all 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.

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

The longest way must have its close - the gloomiest night will wear on to a morning.

The greater the interest involved in a truth the more careful, self-distrustful, and patient should be the inquiry.

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.

Greek is the morning land of languages, and has the freshness of early dew in it which will never exhale.

The bitterest tears shed over graves are for words left unsaid and deeds left undone.

How, then, shall a Christian bear fruit? By efforts and struggles to obtain that which is freely given; by meditations on watchfulness, on prayer, on action, on temptation, and on dangers? No, there must be a full concentration of the thoughts and affections on Christ; a complete surrender of the whole being to him; a constant looking to him for grace.

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

A man builds a house in England with the expectation of living in it and leaving it to his children; we shed our houses in America as easily as a snail does his shell.

Your little child is the only true democrat.