Harriet Beecher Stowe Quotes

Instead of being at the mercy of wild beasts, earthquakes, landslides, and inundations, modern man is battered by the elemental forces of his own psyche. This is the World Power that vastly exceeds all other powers on earth. The Age of Enlightenment, which stripped nature and human institutions of gods, overlooked the God of Terror who dwells in the human soul.

What interests me is the sense of the darkness that we carry within us, the darkness that's akin to one of the principal subjects of the sublime - terror.

There are depths to the human soul that should not be fathomed.

I think that there's a hidden darkness in all of us!

Those darker sides, the things that we don't want to admit about ourselves - that's what excites me.

There is no dignity like the dignity of a soul in agony.

Was ever any wicked man free from the stings of a guilty conscience?

If a bell failed to ring, if a stove smoked, if a wheel on a machine stuck, you knew at once where to look and did so with alacrity; you found the defect and knew how to cure it. But the thing within you, the secret mainspring that alone gave meaning to life, the thing within us that alone is living, alone is capable of feeling pleasure and pain, of craving happiness and experiencing it- that was unknown. You knew nothing about that, nothing at all, and if the mainspring failed there was no cure. Wasn't it insane?

Everywhere that a great soul gives utterance to its thoughts, there also is a Golgotha.

The monsters that rose from the dead, they are nothing compared to the ones we carry in our hearts

Do I believe in ghosts? I believe in the ghosts that haunt the human mind.

The human soul is an abyss

Envy and jealousy are the private parts of the human soul. Perhaps the comparison can be extended.

A guilty conscience never feels secure.

We are each our own devil, and we make this world our hell.

It is not only spirits who punish the evil, the soul brings itself to judgment: and also it is not right for those who endure for ever to attain everything in a short time: and also, there is need of human virtue. If punishment followed instantly upon sin, men would act justly from fear and have no virtue.

May new sufferings torment your soul.

Lucifer protests he was never to blame for inducing anyone to sin, and that he’s never had an interest in owning souls: 'They die, and they come here – having transgressed against what they believed to be right – and expect us to fulfill their desire for pain and retribution. I don’t make them come here… I need no souls. And how can anyone own a soul? No, they belong to themselves. They just hate to have to face up to it.

By digging into our souls, we often dig up what might better have remained there unnoticed." Alexis Alexandrovich

I saw all the suffering that Kurt Cobain went through. I saw this real vibrant person turn into a real shy, timid, withdrawn person.

Sometimes the darkness lives inside you, and sometimes it wins.

There are true unseen forces, but not nearly so many as we believe, nor would they rule us so sternly if we did not admit them to our souls. We would not be assailed half so often by devils, had we not taken the trouble to invent so many of them.

He imagined the pain of the world to be like some formless parasitic being seeking out the warmth of human souls wherein to incubate and he thought he knew what made one liable to its visitations. What he had not known was that it was mindless and so had no way to know the limits of those souls and what he feared was that there might be no limits.

We must never fear robbers or murderers. They are dangers from outside, small dangers. It is ourselves we have to fear. Prejudice is the real robber, vice the real murderer. Why should we be troubled by a threat to our person or our pocket? What we have to beware of is the threat to our souls'.

My soul is a broken field, plowed by pain.