Top 250 Harriet Beecher Stowe Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “Your little child is the only true democrat.”

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

52. “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!”

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

53. “In the gates of eternity the black hand and the white hand hold each other with equal clasp...”

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

54. “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

55. “General rules will bear hard on particular cases.”

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

56. “I am braver than I was because I have lost all; and he who has nothing to lose can afford all risks.”

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

57. “I ’spect I growed. Don’t think nobody never made me.”

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

58. “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

59. “O, ye who visit the distressed, do ye know that everything your money can buy, given with a cold, averted face, is not worth one honest tear shed in real sympathy?”

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

60. “Eyes that have never wept cannot comprehend sorrow.”

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

61. “If it were your Harry, mother, or your Willie, that were going to be torn from you by a brutal trader, tomorrow morning, – if you had seen the man, and heard that the papers were signed and delivered, and you had only from twelve o’clock till morning to make good your escape, – how fast could you walk?”

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

62. “Home is a place not only of strong affections, but of entire unreserve; it is life’s undress rehearsal, its backroom, its dressing room.”

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

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

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

64. “It lies around us like a cloud- A world we do not see; Yet the sweet closing of an eye May bring us there to be.”

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

65. “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

66. “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?”

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

67. “Mothers are the most instinctive philosophers.”

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

68. “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

69. “My vocation to preach on paper.”

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

70. “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

71. “Cause I’s wicked, – I is. I’s mighty wicked, anyhow, I can’t help it.”

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

72. “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

73. “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

74. “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

75. “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.”

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

76. “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

77. “When a heavy weight presses the soul to the lowest level at which endurance is possible, there is an instant and desperate effort of every physical and moral nerve to throw off the weight; and hence the heaviest anguish often precedes a return tide of joy and courage.”

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

78. “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

79. “Perhaps you laugh too, dear reader; but you know humanity comes out in a variety of strange forms now-a-days, and there is no end to the odd things that humane people will say and do.”

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

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

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

81. “No one is so thoroughly superstitious as the godless man.”

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

82. “And, perhaps, among us may be found generous spirits, who do not estimate honour and justice by dollars and cents.”

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

83. “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.”

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

84. “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.”

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

85. “Behold! thou hast one more chance! Strive for immortal glory!”

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

86. “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

87. “A ship is a beauty and a mystery wherever we see it...”

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

88. “Friendships are discovered rather than made.”

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

89. “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

90. “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

91. “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

92. “The hand of benevolence is everywhere stretched out, searching into abuses, righting wrongs, alleviating distresses, and bringing to the knowledge and sympathies of the world the lowly, the oppressed, and the forgotten.”

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

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

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

94. “No tear dropped over that pillow; in such straits as these, the heart has no tears to give, – it drops only blood, bleeding itself away in silence.”

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

95. “I would not attack the faith of a heathen without being sure I had a better one to put in its place.”

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

96. “Love needs new leaves every summer of life, as much as your elm-tree, and new branches to grow broader and wider, and new flowers to cover the ground.”

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

97. “As oil will find its way into crevices where water cannot penetrate, so song will find its way where speech can no longer enter.”

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

98. “O, that’s what troubles me, papa. You want me to live so happy, and never to have any pain, – never suffer anything, – not even hear a sad story, when other poor creatures have nothing but pain and sorrow, all their lives, – it seems selfish. I ought to know such things, I ought to feel about them!”

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

99. “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

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

— Harriet Beecher Stowe