Harriet Beecher Stowe Quotes - Page 5

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

The world has been busy for some centuries in shutting and locking every door through which a woman could step into wealth, except the door of marriage.

It would be an incalculable gain to domestic happiness, if people would begin the concert of life with their instruments tuned to a very low pitch: they who receive the most happiness are generally they who demand and expect the least.

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?

What is it that sometimes speaks in the soul so calmly, so clearly, that its earthly time is short? Is it the secret instinct of decaying nature, or the soul's impulsive throb, as immortality draws on? Be what it may, it rested in the heart of Eva, a calm, sweet, prophetic certainty that Heaven was near; calm as the light of sunset, sweet as the bright stillness of autumn, there her little heart reposed, only troubled by sorrow for those who loved her so dearly.

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

Whipping and abuse are like laudanum: you have to double the dose as the sensibilities decline.

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 earthliness, is yet like the forewarning trumpet of doom!

Children will grow up substantially what they are by nature--and only that.

There are griefs which grow with years.

The greater the interest involved in a truth the more careful, self-distrustful, and patient should be the inquiry.

it isn't mere love and good-will that is needed in a sick-room; it needs knowledge and experience.

O, what an untold world there is in one human heart!

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.

We can make ourselves say the kind things that rise in our hearts and tremble on our lips - do the gentle and helpful deeds which we long to do and shrink back from; and little by little, it will grow easier - the love spoken will bring back the answer of love - the kind deed will bring back a kind deed in return.

Prayer is a long rope with a strong hold.

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

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

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.

Strange, what brings these past things so vividly back to us, sometimes!

Human nature is above all things lazy.

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.

Now, if the principle of toleration were once admitted into classical education - if it were admitted that the great object is to read and enjoy a language, and the stress of the teaching were placed on the few things absolutely essential to this result, if the tortoise were allowed time to creep, and the bird permitted to fly, and the fish to swim, towards the enchanted and divine sources of Helicon - all might in their own way arrive there, and rejoice in its flowers, its beauty, and its coolness.

In the old times, women did not get their lives written, though I don't doubt many of them were much better worth writing than the men's.

...the heart has no tears to give,--it drops only blood, bleeding itself away in silence.