Harriet Beecher Stowe
Harriet Beecher Stowe
Harriet Elisabeth Beecher Stowewas an American abolitionist and author. She came from a famous religious family and is best known for her novel Uncle Tom's Cabin. It depicts the harsh life for African Americans under slavery. It reached millions as a novel and play, and became influential in the United States and Great Britain. It energized anti-slavery forces in the American North, while provoking widespread anger in the South. She wrote 30 books, including novels, three travel memoirs, and collections...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNon-Fiction Author
Date of Birth14 June 1811
CityLitchfield, CT
CountryUnited States of America
Humankind above all is lazy.
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 remonstrance, we are no true lover, no true friend.
There are in this world blessed souls, whose sorrows all spring up into joys for others; whose earthly hopes, laid in the grave with many tears, are the seed from which spring healing flowers and balm for the desolate and the distressed.
Once in an age God sends to some of us a friend who loves in us, not a false-imagining, an unreal character, but looking through the rubbish of our imperfections, loves in us the divine ideal of our nature,--loves, not the man that we are, but the angel that we may be.
Where painting is weakest, namely, in the expression of the highest moral and spiritual ideas, there music is sublimely strong.
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.
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.
Whipping and abuse are like laudanum: you have to double the dose as the sensibilities decline.
Treat 'em like dogs, and you'll have dogs' works and dogs' actions. Treat 'em like men, and you'll have men's works.
It takes years and maturity to make the discovery that the power of faith is nobler than the power of doubt; and that there is a celestial wisdom in the ingenuous propensity to trust, which belongs to honest and noble natures.
When winds are raging o'er the upper ocean And billows wild contend with angry roar, 'Tis 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.
To do common things perfectly is far better worth our endeavor than to do uncommon things respectably.
The obstinacy of cleverness and reason is nothing to the obstinacy of folly and inanity.
Behold! thou hast one more chance! Strive for immortal glory!