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

A woman's health is her capital.

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

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

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

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

I did not write it. God wrote it. I merely did his dictation.

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

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

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

The past, the present and the future are really one: they are today.

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

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

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

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

— 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

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

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

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

Between the mysteries of death and lifeThou Lamb that hast been slain, we rest in Thee.

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

What makes saintliness in my view, as distinguished from ordinary goodness, is a certain quality of magnanimity and greatness of soul that brings life within the circle of the heroic.

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

Still, still with Thee, when purple morning breaketh,Dawns the sweet consciousness, — I am with Thee.

— 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 country I trembled at the coming day of wrath. It is no merit in the sorrowful that they weep, or to the oppressed and smothering that they gasp and struggle, not to me, that I must speak for the oppressed — who cannot speak for themselves.

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

The greater the interest involved in a truth the more careful, self-distrustful, and patient should be the inquiry. I would not attack the faith of a heathen without being sure I had a better one to put in its place, because, such as it is, it is better than nothing.

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

It's a matter of taking the side of the weak against the strong, something the best people have always done.

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

When you get into a tight place and everything goes against you, till it seems as though you could not hang on a minute longer, never give up then, for that is just the place and time that the tide will turn.

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

Most mothers are instinctive philosophers.

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

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.

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

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.

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

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

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

One would like to be grand and heroic, if one could; but if not, why try at all? One wants to be very something, very great, very heroic; or if not that, then at least very stylish and very fashionable. It is this everlasting mediocrity that bores me.

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

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.

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

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.

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

People have wondered where the seat of original sin is; I think it 's in the stomach. A man eats too much and neglects exercise, and the Devil has him all his own way, and the little imps, with their long black fingers, play on his nerves like a piano. Never overwork either body or mind, boys. All the work that a man can do that can be rested by one night's sleep is good for him, but fatigue that goes into the next day is always bad.

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

When winds are raging o'er the upper ocean Disturbs the Sabbath of that deeper sea.

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

I did not write it. God wrote it. I merely did his dictation.

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

It don't look well, now, for a feller to be praisin' himself; but I say it jest because it's the truth. I believe I'm reckoned to bring in about the finest droves of niggers that is brought in, — at least, I've been told so; if I have once, I reckon I have a hundred times, — all in good case, — fat and likely, and I lose as few as any man in the business. And I lays it all to my management, sir; and humanity, sir, I may say, is the great pillar of my management.

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

Well, good-by, Uncle Tom; keep a stiff upper lip.

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

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

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

The horrid cruelties and outrages that once and a while find their way into the papers — such cases as Prue's, for example — what do they come from? In many cases, it is a gradual hardening process on both sides — the owner growing more and more cruel, as the servant more and more callous. Whipping and abuse are like laudanum; you have to double the dose as the sensibilities decline.

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

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

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

Perhaps it is impossible for a person who does no good not to do harm.

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

O, with what freshness, what solemnity and beauty, is each new day born; as if to say to insensate man, "Behold! thou hast one more chance! Strive for immortal glory!" There is no speech nor language where this voice is not heard; but the bold, bad man heard it not. He woke with an oath and a curse. What to him was the gold and purple, the daily miracle of morning!

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

By what strange law of mind is it that an idea long overlooked, and trodden under foot as a useless stone, suddenly sparkles out in new light, as a discovered diamond?

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

No one is so thoroughly superstitious as the godless man.

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

Legree had had the slumbering moral elements in him roused by his encounters with Tom, — roused, only to be resisted by the determinate force of evil; but still there was a thrill and commotion of the dark, inner world, produced by every word, or prayer, or hymn, that reacted in superstitious dread.

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

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

To fill up Liberia with an ignorant, inexperienced, half-barbarized race, just escaped from the chains of slavery, would be only to prolong, for ages, the period of struggle and conflict which attends the inception of new enterprises.

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

Human nature is above all things — lazy.

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

To do common things perfectly is far better worth our endeavor than to do uncommon things respectably.

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

All places where women are excluded tend downward to barbarism; but the moment she is introduced, there come in with her courtesy, cleanliness, sobriety, and order.

— 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

Care and labor are as much correlated to human existence as shadow is to light...

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

Whatever offices of life are performed by women of culture and refinement are thenceforth elevated; they cease to be mere servile toils, and become expressions of the ideas of superior beings.

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

A woman's health is her capital.

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

Home is a place not only of strong affections, but of entire unreserve; it is life's undress rehearsal, its backroom, its dressing room, from which we go forth to more careful and guarded intercourse, leaving behind us much debris of cast-off and everyday clothing.

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

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

— 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 a remonstrance, we are no true lover, no true friend.

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

The obstinancy of cleverness and reason is nothing to the obstinancy of folly and inanity.

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

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.

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

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

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

The past, the present and the future are really one: they are today.

— Harriet Beecher Stowe