Best 177 quotes of Harriet Beecher Stowe on MyQuotes

A cook she certainly was, in the very bone and centre of her soul. Not a....turkey....in the barn-yard but looked grave when they saw her approaching, and seemed evidently to be reflecting on their latter end; and certain it was that she was always meditating on trussing, stuffing and roasting, to a degree that was calculated to inspire terror in any reflecting fowl living.

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?

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.

All men are free and equal in the grave, if it comes to that.

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.

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.

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

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

a true gentleman ... was characterized as the man that asks the fewest questions. This trait of refined society might be adopted into home-like in a far greater degree than it is, and make it far more agreeable.

A woman's health is her capital.

Behold! thou hast one more chance! Strive for immortal glory!

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?

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

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

Cause I's wicked, - I is. I's mighty wicked, anyhow, I can't help it.

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!

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.

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.

Fanaticism is governed by imagination rather than judgment.

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.

Friends are discovered rather than made; there are people who are in their own nature friends, only they don't know each other; but certain things, like poetry, music, and paintings are like the Freemason's sign, they reveal the initiated to each other.

Gems, in fact, are a species of mineral flowers; they are the blossoms of the dark, hard mine; and what they want in perfume, they make up in durability.

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

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

God washes the eyes by tears unil they can behold the invisible land where tears shall come no more.

Great as the planning were for the dinner, the lot was so contrived that not a soul in the house be supposed to be kept from the break of day ceremony of Blessing in the church.

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

he who has nothing to lose can afford all risks.

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

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.

Human nature is above all things lazy.

I am one of the sort that lives by throwing stones at other people's glass houses, but I never mean to put up one for them to stone.

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

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.

I don't know as I am fit for anything and I have thought that I could wish to die young and let the remembrance of me and my faults perish in the grave rather than live, as I fear I do, a trouble to everyone.... Sometimes I could not sleep and have groaned and cried till midnight.

If we let our friend become cold and selfish and exacting without a remonstrance, we are no true lover, no true friend.

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

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

I honestly do not know if civil disobedience has any effect on the government. I can promise you it has a great effect on the person who chooses to do it. Martin Sheen 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.

I long to put the experience of fifty years at once into your young lives, to give you at once the key of that treasure chamber every gem of which has cost me tears and struggles and prayers, but you must work for these inward treasures yourself.

in America, far too large a portion of the diet consists of animal food. As a nation, the Americans are proverbial for the gross and luxurious diet with which they load their tables; and there can be no doubt that the general health of the nation would be increased by a change in our customs in this respect.

I never thought my book would turn so many people against slavery.

In lecturing on cookery, as on housebuilding, I divide the subject into, not four, but five grand elements: first, Bread; second,Butter; third, Meat; fourth, Vegetables; and fifth, Tea--by which I mean, generically, all sorts of warm, comfortable drinks served out in teacups, whether they be called tea, coffee, chocolate, broma, or what not. I affirm that, if these five departments are all perfect, the great ends of domestic cookery are answered, so far as the comfort and well-being of life are concerned.

I no more thought of style or literary excellence than the mother who rushes into the street and cries for help to save her children from a burning house, thinks of the teachings of the rhetorician or the elocutionist.

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

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

It has always been a favorite idea of mine, that there is so much of the human in every man, that the life of any one individual, however obscure, if really and vividly perceived in all its aspirations, struggles, failures, and successes, would command the interest of all others.

It is always our treasure that the lightning strikes.

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.

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.