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Advice
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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.
-Harriet Beecher Stowe
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Authors & Writing
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I 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.
-Harriet Beecher Stowe, on writing Uncle Tom's Cabin
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Desires
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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
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Education
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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.
-Harriet Beecher Stowe
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Effort
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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.
-Harriet Beecher Stowe
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Friends
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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.
-Harriet Beecher Stowe
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Goodness
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What makes saintliness in my view, as distinguished from ordinary goodness, is a certain quality of magnanimity and greatness of soul that brings life within the circle of the heroic.
-Harriet Beecher Stowe
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Greatness & Great Things
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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
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Home
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Home is a place not only of strong affections, but of entire unreserve; it is life's undress rehearsal, its backroom, its dressing room.
-Harriet Beecher Stowe
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Mediocrity
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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
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Mother
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Mothers are the most instinctive philosophers.
-Harriet Beecher Stowe
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Persistence
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When you get in a tight place and everything goes against you, until it seems as if you could not hold on a minute longer, never give up then, for that is just the place and time when the tide will turn.
-Harriet Beecher Stowe
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Prayer
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Sweet souls around us watch us still,
Press nearer to our side;
Into our thoughts, into our prayers,
With gentle helpings glide.
-Harriet Beecher Stowe
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Protest
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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.
-Harriet Beecher Stowe
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Reflection
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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.
-Harriet Beecher Stowe
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Regret & Remorse
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The bitterest tears shed over graves are for words left unsaid and deeds left undone.
-Harriet Beecher Stowe
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Serenity
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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.
-Harriet Beecher Stowe
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Slavery
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Nobody had ever instructed him that a slave-ship, with a procession of expectant sharks in its wake, is a missionary institution, by which closely-packed heathen are brought over to enjoy the light of the Gospel.
-Harriet Beecher Stowe
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So long as the law considers all these human beings, with beating hearts and living affections, only as so many things belonging to the master -- so long as the failure, or misfortune, or imprudence, or death of the kindest owner, may cause them any day to exchange a life of kind protection and indulgence for one of hopeless misery and toil -- so long it is impossible to make anything beautiful or desirable in the best-regulated administration of slavery.
-Harriet Beecher Stowe
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Stubbornness
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The obstinacy of cleverness and reason is nothing to the obstinacy of folly and inanity.
-Harriet Beecher Stowe
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Superstition
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No one is so thoroughly superstitious as the godless man.
-Harriet Beecher Stowe
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Time
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The longest day must have its close --the gloomiest night will wear on to a morning. An eternal, inexorable lapse of moments is ever hurrying the day of the evil to an eternal night, and the night of the just to an eternal day.
-Harriet Beecher Stowe
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Torture
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Whipping and abuse are like laudanum; you have to double the dose as the sensibilities decline.
-Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin, ch. 20 (1852)
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Books by and about Harriet Beecher Stowe