Harriet Beecher Stowe Quotes

       Harriet Beecher Stowe
       1811-1896
      
       Harriet Beecher Stowe was an American abolitionist and author. Harriet was born in Litchfield, Connecticut, as the daughter of an outspoken religious leader Lyman Beecher. She was the sister of the educator and author, Catherine Beecher, clergymen Henry Ward Beecher and Charles Beecher.
      
       Her father was a preacher who was greatly effected by the pro-slavery riots that took place in Cincinnati in 1834.
      
       Stowe's novel Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) depicted life for African-Americans under slavery; it reached millions as a novel and play, and became influential in the U.S. and Britain and made the political issues of the 1850s regarding slavery tangible to millions, energizing anti-slavery forces in the American North, while provoking widespread anger in the South. Upon meeting Stowe, Abraham Lincoln allegedly remarked, "So this is the little old lady who started this new great war!"

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.     Topics: Achievement I long to put the experience of fifty years at once into your young lives, to give you at once the key to that treasure chamber every gem of which has cost me tears and struggles and prayers, but you must work for these inward treasures yourselves.     Topics: Achievement, Struggles I did not write it. God wrote it. I merely did his dictation.     Topics: Books No one is so thoroughly superstitious as the godless man.     Topics: Character The bitterest tears shed over graves are for words left unsaid and deeds left undone.     Topics: Death, Bitterness I would not attack the faith of a heathen without being sure I had a better one to put in its place.     Topics: Faith, Christianity 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.     Topics: Fathers, America Friendships are discovered rather than made.     Topics: Friendship 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.     Topics: God, Life, Beauty Any mind that is capable of real sorrow is capable of good.     Topics: Good and Evil Perhaps it is impossible for a person who does no good to do no harm.     Topics: Good and Evil A woman's health is her capital.     Topics: Health