Quotations from Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom's Cabin and other novels and books. See also: Harriet Beecher Stowe Biography
Selected Harriet Beecher Stowe Quotations
• The past, the present and the future are really one: they are today.
• If women want any rights they had better take them, and say nothing about it
• Women are the real architects of society.
• So long as the law considers all these human beings, with beating hearts and living affections, only as so many things belonging to the master -- so long as the failure, or misfortune, or imprudence, or death of the kindest owner, may cause them any day to exchange a life of kind protection and indulgence for one of hopeless misery and toil -- so long it is impossible to make anything beautiful or desirable in the best-regulated administration of slavery.
• 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
• I did not write it. God wrote it. I merely did his dictation.
• When you get into a tight place and everything goes against you till it seems you could not hold on a minute longer, never give up then for that is just the place and time that the tide will turn.
• So much has been said and sung of beautiful young girls, why doesn't somebody wake up to the beauty of old women?
• Common sense is seeing things as they are; and doing things as they ought to be.
• The truth is the kindest thing we can give folks in the end.
• Friendships are discovered rather than made.
• Most mothers are instinctive philosophers.
• Although mother's bodily presence disappeared from our circle, I think that her memory and example had more influence in molding her family, in deterring from evil and exciting to good, than the living presence of many mothers. It was a memory that met us everywhere; for every person in the town seemed to have been so impressed by her character and life that they constantly reflected some portion of it back upon us.
• Human nature is above all things -- lazy.
• The bitterest tears shed over graves are for words left unsaid and deeds left undone.
• Perhaps it is impossible for a person who does no good to do no harm.
• Whipping and abuse are like laudanum: you have to double the dose as the sensibilities decline.
• Any mind that is capable of real sorrow is capable of good.
• It's a matter of taking the side of the weak against the strong, something the best people have always done.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
