Top 250 Harriet Beecher Stowe Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 3 of 6

101. “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

102. “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

103. “But it is often those who have least of all in this life whom He chooseth for the kingdom. Put thy trust in Him and no matter what befalls thee here, He will make all right hereafter.”

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

104. “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

105. “It is always our treasure that the lightning strikes.”

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

106. “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

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

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

108. “There are two classes of human beings in this world: one class seem made to give love, and the other to take it.”

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

109. “I b’lieve in religion, and one of these days, when I’ve got matters tight and snug, I calculates to tend to my soul...”

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

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

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

111. “Children will grow up substantially what they are by nature – and only that.”

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

112. “I’ve lost everything in this world, and it’s clean gone, forever – and now I can’t lose heaven, too; no, I can’t get to be wicked, besides all.”

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

113. “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

114. “Fanaticism is governed by imagination rather than judgment.”

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

115. “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

116. “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

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

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

118. “Women are the true modelers of social order.”

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

119. “Perhaps it is impossible for a person who does no good to do no harm.”

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

120. “We ought to be free to meet and mingle, – to rise by our individual worth, without any consideration of caste or color; and they who deny us this right are false to their own professed principals of human equality.”

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

121. “There are griefs which grow with years.”

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

122. “I have looked in her face with solemn awe, when she would point up to the stars in the evening, and say to me, ‘See there, Auguste! the poorest, meanest soul on our place will be living, when all these stars are gone forever, – will live as long as God lives!”

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

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

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

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

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

125. “Money is a great help everywhere; – can’t have too much, if you get it honestly.”

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

126. “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.”

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

127. “Let us never doubt everything that ought to happen is going to happen.”

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

128. “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!”

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

129. “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

130. “Rome is an astonishment!”

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

131. “The obstinacy of cleverness and reason is nothing to the obstinacy of folly and inanity.”

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

132. “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.”

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

133. “One should have expected some terrible enormities charged to those who are excluded from heaven, as the reason; but no, – they are condemned for not doing positive good, as if that included every possible harm.”

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

134. “Obeying God never brings on public evils. I know it can’t. It’s always safest, all round, to do as He bids us.”

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

135. “Can anybody tell what sorrows are locked up with our best affections, or what pain may be associated with every pleasure?”

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

136. “Even so, beloved Eva! fair star of thy dwelling! Thou art passing away; but they that love thee dearest know it not.”

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

137. “Come down here once, and use your eyes, and you will know more than we can teach you.”

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

138. “An atmosphere of sympathetic influence encircles every human being; and the man or woman who feels strongly, healthily and justly, on the great interests of humanity, is a constant benefactor to the human race.”

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

139. “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.”

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

140. “Look at the high and the low, all the world over, and it’s the same story, – the lower class used up, body, soul and spirit, for the good of the upper.”

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

141. “Governments derive their just power from the consent of the governed.”

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

142. “But in real life we do not die when all that makes life bright dies to us.”

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

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

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

144. “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

145. “It would be an incalculable gain to domestic happiness, if people would begin the concert of life with their instruments tuned to a very low pitch: they who receive the most happiness are generally they who demand and expect the least.”

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

146. “And though it be not so in the physical, yet in moral science that which cannot be understood is not always profitless. For the soul awakes, a trembling stranger, between two dim eternities, – the eternal past, the eternal future. The light shines only on a small space around her; therefore, she needs must yearn towards the unknown; and the voices and shadowy movings which come to her from out the cloudy pillar of inspiration have each one echoes and answers in her own expecting nature.”

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

147. “Is there anything in it glorious and dear for a nation, that is not also glorious and dear for a man? What is freedom to a nation, but freedom to the individuals in it?”

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

148. “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.”

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

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

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

150. “People who hate trouble generally get a good deal of it.”

— Harriet Beecher Stowe