335 Quotes by Harriet Beecher Stowe

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.

So we go, so little knowing what we touch and what touches us as we talk! We drop out a common piece of news, "Mr. So-and-so is dead, Miss Such-a-one is married, such a ship has sailed," and lo, on our right hand or on our left, some heart has sunk under the news silently - gone down in the great ocean of Fate, without even a bubble rising to tell its drowning pang. And this - God help us! - is what we call 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?

Why don't somebody wake up to the beauty of old women?

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?

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...

Women’s Day Women are the real architects of society.

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

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.