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Free Literature Study Guides
The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Free Literature Study Guides
The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Harriet Beecher Stowe Quotes

To do common things perfectly is far better worth our endeavor than to do uncommon things respectably.

– Harriet Beecher Stowe

It’s a matter of taking the side of the weak against the strong, something the best people have always done.

– Harriet Beecher Stowe

The bitterest tears shed over graves are for words left unsaid and deeds left undone.

– Harriet Beecher Stowe

Perhaps it is impossible for a person who does no good to do no harm.

– Harriet Beecher Stowe

Human nature is above all things lazy.

– Harriet Beecher Stowe

The obstinacy of cleverness and reason is nothing to the obstinacy of folly and inanity.

– Harriet Beecher Stowe

I did not write it. God wrote it. I merely did his dictation.

– Harriet Beecher Stowe

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.

– Harriet Beecher Stowe

Where painting is weakest, namely, in the expression of the highest moral and spiritual ideas, there music is sublimely strong.

– Harriet Beecher Stowe

The past, the present and the future are really one: they are today.

– Harriet Beecher Stowe

Most mothers are instinctive philosophers.

– Harriet Beecher Stowe

So much has been said and sung of beautiful young girls, why doesn’t somebody wake up to the beauty of old women.

– Harriet Beecher Stowe

A man builds a house in England with the expectation of living in it and leaving it to his children; we shed our houses in America as easily as a snail does his shell.

– Harriet Beecher Stowe

I would not attack the faith of a heathen without being sure I had a better one to put in its place.

– Harriet Beecher Stowe

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

– Harriet Beecher Stowe

All places where women are excluded tend downward to barbarism; but the moment she is introduced, there come in with her courtesy, cleanliness, sobriety, and order.

– Harriet Beecher Stowe

A woman’s health is her capital.

– Harriet Beecher Stowe

Friendships are discovered rather than made.

– Harriet Beecher Stowe

Any mind that is capable of real sorrow is capable of good.

– Harriet Beecher Stowe

Everyone confesses that exertion which brings out all the powers of body and mind is the best thing for us; but 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.

– Harriet Beecher Stowe

No one is so thoroughly superstitious as the godless man.

– Harriet Beecher Stowe

Never give up, for that is just the place and time that the tide will turn.

– Harriet Beecher Stowe

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.

– Harriet Beecher Stowe

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.

– Harriet Beecher Stowe

When you get into a tight place and everything goes against you, till it seems as though you could not hang on a minute longer, never give up then, for that is just the place and time that the tide will turn.

– Harriet Beecher Stowe