First Quote Added
April 10, 2026
Latest Quote Added
"When winds are raging o'er the upper ocean And billows wild contend with angry roar, 'T is said, far down beneath the wild commotion That peaceful stillness reigneth evermore. Far, far beneath, the noise of tempests dieth And silver waves chime ever peacefully, And no rude storm, how fierce soe'er it flyeth Disturbs the Sabbath of that deeper sea."
"When you get into a tight place, and everything goes against you till it seems as if you could n't hold on a minute longer, never give up then, for that 's just the place and time that the tide 'll turn. Never trust to prayer without using every means in your power, and never use the means without trusting in prayer. Get your evidences of grace by pressing forward to the mark, and not by groping with a lantern after the boundary-lines, — and so, boys, go, and God bless you!""
"People have wondered where the seat of original sin is; I think it 's in the stomach. A man eats too much and neglects exercise, and the Devil has him all his own way, and the little imps, with their long black fingers, play on his nerves like a piano. Never overwork either body or mind, boys. All the work that a man can do that can be rested by one night's sleep is good for him, but fatigue that goes into the next day is always bad."
"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."
""Well, mother, people have different names for different things. I hear a great deal about Ellery Davenport's tact and knowledge of the world, and all that; but he does a great deal of what I call lying, — so there! Now there are some folks who lie blunderingly, and unskilfully, but I 'll say for Ellery Davenport that he can lie as innocently and sweetly and prettily as a French woman, and I can't say any more. And if a woman does n't want to believe him, she just must n't listen to him, that 's all. I always believe him when he is around, but when he 's away and I think him over, I know just what he is, and see just what an old fool he has made of me." These words dropped into my childish mind as if you should accidentally drop a ring into a deep well. I did not think of them much at the time, but there came a day in my life when the ring was fished up out of the well, good as new."
"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."
"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."
"The truth is the kindest thing we can give folks in the end."
"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."
"That ignorant confidence in one's self and one's future, which comes in life's first dawn, has a sort of mournful charm in experienced eyes, who know how much it all amounts to."
"Not only was he ignorant, but he had not even those conditions within himself which made knowledge possible. All that there was developed of him, at present, was a fund of energy, self-esteem, hope, courage, and daring, the love of action, life, and adventure; his life was in the outward and present, not in the inward and reflective; he was a true ten-year old boy, in its healthiest and most animal perfection. What she was, the small pearl with the golden hair, with her frail and high-strung organization, her sensitive nerves, her half-spiritual fibres, her ponderings, and marvels, and dreams, her power of love, and yearning for self-devotion, our readers may, perhaps, have seen. But if ever two children, or two grown people, thus organized, are thrown into intimate relations, it follows, from the very laws of their being, that one must hurt the other, simply by being itself; one must always hunger for what the other has not to give."
"Most mothers are instinctive philosophers."
"He was called a good fellow, — only a little lumpish, — and as he was brave and faithful, he rose in time to be a shipmaster. But when came the business of making money, the aptitude for accumulating, George found himself distanced by many a one with not half his general powers. What shall a man do with a sublime tier of moral faculties, when the most profitable business out of his port is the slave-trade? So it was in Newport in those days. George's first voyage was on a slaver, and he wished himself dead many a time before it was over, — and ever after would talk like a man beside himself, if the subject was named. He declared that the gold made in it was distilled from human blood, from mothers' tears, from the agonies and dying groans of gasping, suffocating men and women, and that it would sear and blister the soul of him that touched it; in short, he talked as whole-souled, unpractical fellows are apt to talk about what respectable people sometimes do. Nobody had ever instructed him that a slaveship, with a procession of expectant sharks in its wake, is a missionary institution, by which closely. packed heathens are brought over to enjoy the light of the Gospel. So, though George was acknowledged to be a good fellow, and honest as the noon-mark on the kitchen floor, he let slip so many chances of making money as seriously to compromise his reputation among thriving folks. He was wastefully generous — insisted on treating every poor dog that came in his way, in any foreign port, as a brother — absolutely refused to be party in cheating or deceiving the heathen on any shore, or in skin of any color — and also took pains, as far as in him lay, to spoil any bargains which any of his subordinates founded on the ignorance or weakness of his fellow-men. So he made voyage after voyage, and gained only his wages and the reputation among his employers of an incorruptibly honest fellow."
"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."
"The greater the interest involved in a truth the more careful, self-distrustful, and patient should be the inquiry. I would not attack the faith of a heathen without being sure I had a better one to put in its place, because, such as it is, it is better than nothing."
"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 country I trembled at the coming day of wrath. 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."
"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. Christians in whom these dispositions are once firmly fixed, go on calmly as the sleeping infant borne in the arms of its mother. Christ reminds them of every duty in its time and place—reproves them for every error—counsels them in every difficulty, excites them to every needful activity. In spiritual, as in temporal matters, they take no thought for the morrow—for they know that Christ will be as accessible tomorrow as to-day, and that time imposes no barrier on his love. Their hope and trust rest solely on what he is willing and able to do for them; on nothing that they suppose themselves able and willing to do for him."
"The novel has enormous power. Uncle Tom's Cabin may be a tearjerker, but it succeeds. Many readers find their eyes filling up as Eliza climbs up the Ohio riverbank, or George Shelby pledges to do "what one man can" to fight slavery. Stowe wanted to convince people that slavery was wrong, to engage their emotions. Her overheated style accomplishes that, perhaps better than more controlled writing would have been able to."
"The realm of fiction yet remains undisturbed by the Afro-Americans as a positive factor in a permanent way. This is much to be regretted, because he occupies so large a position, as a negative force. With slavery for a subject, Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe gave America its strongest work of fiction, but the Afro-American there represented, though true in its delineation to the life it represented, does not represent the Afro-American of to-day. Our best literary friends have failed to do it, so ineradicable is prejudice; it is not in their power to understand that the Afro-American is a man with all the attributes of manhood. They have viewed us with a white man’s glasses so long, seeing only the ignorant and humble side, there seems no other perspective for them. Thus it is that to the world at large the conviction is widespread that we are a menial, servile, happy-go-lucky race, given to petty thievery or humble, forgiving and submissive, as was “Uncle Tom.” The literature of the day has so portrayed us. The greatest [claim] to literary merit of the new corps of Southern writers is their skill in portraying the plantation and servant side of race character by the aid of negro dialect."
"Anyone can see that to write Uncle Tom's Cabin on the knee in the kitchen, with constant calls to cooking and other details of housework to punctuate the paragraphs, was a more difficult achievement than to write it at leisure in a quiet room."
""Uncle Tom's Cabin" came from the heart rather than the head. It was an outburst of deep feeling, a cry in the darkness. The writer 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."
"The pure and worthy Mrs. Stowe is one we all are proud to know As mother, wife, and authoress— Thank God, I am content with less!"
"As our President said, we have in our army such minds as Spencer, and Mill, and I would add Buckle, and many others; and they are diffusing light, intelligence and civilization, and advocating the right. We have women also. We have Frances P. Cobbe; whose name I speak with pride and rejoicing; and in the literary world we have Charlotte Bronte, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, and many others, who are consecrating their talents to the great cause of womanhood, and freedom, and right."
"Why is it that Harriet Beecher Stowe has had such success throughout the wide world? Because her work reaches the sense of right in the universal human heart."
"So you're the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war!"
"Biographies of eminent women designed to appeal to literate women readers became a popular genre in the 19th century in England and in other European countries.In the United States this genre is represented by a two-volume History of Women by Lydia Maria Child...Another example of the genre is a selection of biographies by Harriet Beecher Stowe, Woman in Sacred History: A Series of Sketches Drawn from Scriptural, Historical and Legendary Sources which uses the Old and the New Testament as its source."
"Harriet Beecher, whose glowing pen/Corroded the chains of fettered men."
"Uncle Tom's Cabin is a very bad novel, having, in its self-righteous, virtuous sentimentality, much in common with Little Women. Sentimentality, the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion, is the mark of dishonesty, the inability to feel; the wet eyes of the sentimentalist betray his aversion to experience, his fear of life, his arid heart and it is always, therefore, the signal of secret and violent inhumanity, the mask of cruelty. Uncle Tom's Cabin-like its multitudinous, hard-boiled descendants-is a catalogue of violence. This is explained by the nature of Mrs. Stowe's subject matter, her laudable determination to flinch from nothing in presenting the complete picture; an explanation which falters only if we pause to ask whether or not her picture is indeed complete; and what constriction or failure of perception forced her to so depend on the description of brutality-unmotivated, senseless-and to leave unanswered and unnoticed the only important question: what it was, after all, that moved her people to such deeds. But this, let us say, was beyond Mrs. Stowe's powers; she was not so much a novelist as an impassioned pamphleteer; her book was not intended to do anything more than prove that slavery was wrong; was, in fact, perfectly horrible. This makes material for a pamphlet but it is hardly enough for a novel; and the only question left to ask is why we are bound still within the same constriction. How is it that we are so loath to make a further journey than that made by Mrs. Stowe, to discover and reveal something a little closer to the truth?...Bigger (from Native Son by Richard Wright) is Uncle Tom's descendant, flesh of his flesh, so exactly opposite a portrait that, when the books are placed together, it seems that the contemporary Negro novelist and the dead New England woman are locked together in a deadly, timeless battle; the one uttering merciless exhortations, the other shouting curses."
"Abolitionist writer Thomas Wentworth Higginson said of its author: "To have written at once the most powerful and contemporaneous fiction, and the most efficient antislavery tract is a double triumph in literature and philosophy to which this country has heretofore seen no parallel.""
"The publication of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin in 1851 was a crucial event in the history of antislavery. In a long essay on the life and work of Stowe, the Black civil-rights leader of post-Reconstruction times, Mary Church Terrell, wrote: "In estimating the value of Uncle Tom's Cabin it is not too much to say that the work of no writer of modern times has excited more general and more profound interest than did this masterpiece of Harriet Beecher Stowe. In recounting the incidents and in stating the reasons which led to the emancipation of the slave, it would be difficult to exaggerate the role played by this remarkable book.""
"I feel that woman should in the very Capitol of the nation, lift her voice against that abominable measure. It is not enough that H. B. Stowe should write."
"Still, still with Thee, when purple morning breaketh, When the bird waketh, and the shadows flee; Fairer than morning, lovelier than the daylight, Dawns the sweet consciousness, — I am with Thee."
"Between the mysteries of death and life Thou standest, loving, guiding,— not explaining; We ask, and Thou art silent,— yet we gaze, And our charmed hearts forget their drear complaining; No crushing fate, no stony destiny! Thou Lamb that hast been slain, we rest in Thee."
"Let my soul calm itself, O Christ, in Thee. This is true"
"Harriet lived in Connecticut and influenced antislavery in her book "Uncle Tom's Cabin." Harriet was a optimist who expressed her feelings by writing. Harriet was listed as one of the people who started the civil war. She started it from one of her books (It was the most influencial book in all of American History) However, Harriet was a very successful person and never stood down."
"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."
"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."
"The obstinancy of cleverness and reason is nothing to the obstinancy of folly and inanity."
"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."