335 Quotes by Harriet Beecher Stowe

A woman’s health is her capital.

O, that’s what troubles me, papa. You want me to live so happy, and never to have any pain, – never suffer anything, – not even hear a sad story, when other poor creatures have nothing but pain and sorrow, all their lives, – it seems selfish. I ought to know such things, I ought to feel about them!

And, perhaps, among us may be found generous spirits, who do not estimate honour and justice by dollars and cents.

He had been able to repress every disrespectful word; but the flashing eye, the gloomy and troubled brow, were part of a natural language that could not be repressed, – indubitable signs, which showed too plainly that the man could not become a thing.

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.

But who, sir, makes the trader? Who is most to blame? The enlightened, cultivated, intelligent man, who supports the system of which the trader is the inevitable result, or the poor trader himself? You make the public statement that calls for his trade, that debauches and depraves him, till he feels no shame in it; and in what are you better than he?

I wrote what I did because as a woman, as a mother, I was oppressed and broken-hearted with the sorrows and injustice I saw, because as a Christian I felt the dishonor to Christianity – because as a lover of my county, I trembled at the coming day of wrath.

But then his idea of a fugitive was only an idea of the letters that spell the word, – or at the most, the image of a little newspaper picture of a man with a stick and bundle with ‘Ran away from the subscriber’ under it. The magic of the real presence of distress, – the imploring human eye, frail, trembling human hand, the despairing appeal of helpless agony, – these he had never tried.

A ship is a beauty and a mystery wherever we see it...