Harriet Beecher Stowe Quotes

"Well, mother, people have different names for different things. I hear a great deal about Ellery Davenport's tact and knowledge of the world, and all that; but he does a great deal of what I call lying, — so there! Now there are some folks who lie blunderingly, and unskilfully, but I 'll say for Ellery Davenport that he can lie as innocently and sweetly and prettily as a French woman, and I can't say any more. And if a woman does n't want to believe him, she just must n't listen to him, that 's all. I always believe him when he is around, but when he 's away and I think him over, I know just what he is, and see just what an old fool he has made of me." These words dropped into my childish mind as if you should accidentally drop a ring into a deep well. I did not think of them much at the time, but there came a day in my life when the ring was fished up out of the well, good as new.

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.

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.

But at midnight — strange, mystic hour, when the veil between the frail present and the eternal future grows thin — then came the messenger.

Talk of the abuses of slavery! Humbug! The thing itself is the essence of all abuse!

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.

Between the mysteries of death and life
Thou standest, loving, guiding,— not explaining;
We ask, and Thou art silent,— yet we gaze,
And our charmed hearts forget their drear complaining;
No crushing fate, no stony destiny!
Thou Lamb that hast been slain, we rest in Thee.

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

Oh my Eva, whose little hour on earth did so much good... what account have I to give for my long years?

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.

Is man ever a creature to be trusted with wholly irresponsible power? And does not the slave system, by denying the slave all legal right of testimony, make every individual owner an irresponsible despot? Can anybody fall to make the inference what the practical result will be? If there is, as we admit, a public sentiment among you, men of honor, justice and humanity, is there not also another kind of public sentiment among the ruffian, the brutal and debased? And cannot the ruffian, the brutal, the debased, by slave law, own just as many slaves as the best and purest? Are the honorable, the just, the high-minded and compassionate, the majority anywhere in this world?

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.

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 it's awful perhapses, -those shudderings and temblings, which it can no more live down than it can outlive its own eternity! 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 earthiness, is yet like the forewarning trumpet of doom!

I did not write it. (Uncle Tom's Cabin) God wrote it. I merely did his dictation.

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