Skip to main content

Daily Inspiration Quote by Harriet Tubman

"I looked at my hands to see if I was the same person. There was such a glory over everything. The sun came up like gold through the trees, and I felt like I was in heaven"

About this Quote

Tubman turns liberation into something tactile: she checks her own hands, as if freedom might have altered the body itself. The gesture is quietly radical. Enslavement wasn’t only forced labor; it was a system designed to steal self-recognition, to make a person doubt their own personhood. So the first impulse after crossing into freedom isn’t a speech, or even a plan, but a verification. Am I still me? Or did I become someone else in the act of escaping?

Then she floods the scene with radiance. “Glory” isn’t decorative language; it’s a psychological counterweight to a life engineered for deprivation. The natural world becomes a witness that refuses the slave system’s definitions. The sun “like gold through the trees” reads as more than pretty imagery: it reframes value. Under slavery, Black bodies were treated as capital; here, gold is reassigned to light, to atmosphere, to a morning that belongs to nobody. It’s an economy of perception replacing an economy of ownership.

“I felt like I was in heaven” can sound like simple relief until you remember the stakes: Tubman lived in a culture where religion was used to discipline the enslaved, promising reward later while demanding submission now. Her line steals that language back. Heaven isn’t deferred; it’s briefly experienced on earth, in motion, under threat, at sunrise. The subtext is defiant: freedom is not abstract. It’s sensory, immediate, and so overwhelming it makes the self feel newly minted.

Quote Details

TopicFaith
SourceHelp us find the source
More Quotes by Harriet Add to List
I Looked at My Hands - Harriet Tubman's Reflection on Life
Click to enlarge Portrait | Landscape

About the Author

Harriet Tubman

Harriet Tubman is a Activist from USA.

15 more quotes available

View Profile

Similar Quotes

George William Russell, Writer