Harriet Beecher StoweThinkers

Authority is the most important part of rhetoric. People will accept your ideas much more readily if you tell them that Benjamin Franklin said it first.

The Book is constant company in a room, even when one is not reading.

The Cathedral does not seem to have been built. They seem, rather, stupendous growths of nature, like crystals, or cliffs of basalt.

Common sense is seeing things as they are... and doing things as they ought to be.

Fanaticism is governed by imagination rather than judgment.

Friendship is discovered rather than made. Certain things, like poetry, music, and paintings are like the freemason's sign, they reveal the initiated to each other.

The Gem is a species of mineral flower... they are the blossoms of the dark, hard mine... and what they want in perfume, they make up in durability.

The German is a mixture of clay and spirit. He is perfectly earth with his beer drinking and smoking and stolid ways but in his poetry he is full of ethereal fire that bursts out in most unexpected jets of poetry and sentiment, like blossoms on a cactus.

Home is a place not only of strong affections, but of entire unreserve... it is life's undress rehearsal, its backroom, its dressing room.

The House is built in England with the expectation that his children will live in it. In America we shed our houses as easily as a snail does his shell.