Horace Mann Quotes
Horace Mann shares lofty, moral reflections on education and truth that push you toward a better world.
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Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.
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Education alone can conduct us to that enjoyment which is, at once, best in quality and infinite in quantity.
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Every addition to true knowledge is an addition to human power.
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But let a man know that there are things to be known, of which he is ignorant, and it is so much carved out of his domain of universal knowledge.
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To pity distress is but human; to relieve it is Godlike.
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The object of punishment is, prevention from evil; it never can be made impulsive to good.
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Every school boy and school girl who has arrived at the age of reflection ought to know something about the history of the art of printing.
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Virtue is an angel, but she is a blind one, and must ask of Knowledge to show her the pathway that leads to her goal.
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A teacher who is attempting to teach without inspiring the pupil with a desire to learn is hammering cold iron.
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Teachers teach because they care. Teaching young people is what they do best. It requires long hours, patience, and care.
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A house without books is like a room without windows. No man has a right to bring up his children without surrounding them with books, if he has the means to buy them.
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A human being is not attaining his full heights until he is educated.
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Affectation hides three times as many virtues as charity does sins
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Avoid witicisms at the expense of others.
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Character is what God and the angels know of us; reputation is what men and women think of us.
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Do not think of knocking out another person's brains because he differs in opinion from you. It would be as rational to knock yourself on the head because you differ from yourself ten years ago.
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Doing nothing for others is the undoing of ourselves.
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Education is our only political safety. Outside of this ark all is deluge.
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Education, then, beyond all other devices of human origin, is a great equalizer of conditions of men -the balance wheel of the social machinery... It does better than to disarm the poor of their hostility toward the rich; it prevents being poor.
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Evil and good are God's right hand and left.
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Generosity during life is a very different thing from generosity in the hour of death; one proceeds from genuine liberality and benevolence, the other from pride or fear.
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Genius may conceive but patient labor must consummate.
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Habit is a cable; we weave a thread of it each day, and at last we cannot break it.
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He who cannot resist temptation is not a man.
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I have never heard anything about the resolutions of the apostles, but a good deal about their acts.
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If an idiot were to tell you the same story every day for a year, you would end by believing it
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If any man seeks for greatness, let him forget greatness and ask for truth, and he will find both.
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If evil is inevitable, how are the wicked accountable? Nay, why do we call men wicked at all? Evil is inevitable, but is also remediable.
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Ignorance breeds monsters to fill up the vacancies of the soul that are unoccupied by the verities of knowledge.
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It is more difficult, and it calls for higher energies of soul, to live a martyr than to die one.
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It is well to think well; it is divine to act well.
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Jails and prisons are the complement of schools; so many less as you have of the latter, so many more must you have of the former.
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Let the public mind become corrupt, and all efforts to secure property, liberty, or life by the force of laws written on paper will be as vain as putting up a sign in an apple orchard to exclude canker worms.
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Let us not be content to wait and see what will happen, but give us the determination to make the right things happen.
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Lost, yesterday, somewhere between sunrise and sunset, two golden hours, each set with sixty diamond minutes. No reward is offered for they are gone forever.
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Manners easily and rapidly mature into morals.
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Much that we call evil is really good in disguises; and we should not quarrel rashly with adversities not yet understood, nor overlook the mercies often bound up in them.
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Observation-activity of both eyes and ears.
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Resolve to edge in a little reading every day, if it is but a single sentence. If you gain fifteen minutes a day, it will make itself felt at the end of the year.
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Schoolhouses are the republican line of fortifications.
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Scientific truth is marvelous, but moral truth is divine and whoever breathes its air and walks by its light has found the lost paradise.
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Teaching isn't one-tenth as effective as training.
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Unfaithfulness in the keeping of an appointment is an act of clear dishonesty. You may as well borrow a person's money as his time.
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We go by the major vote, and if the majority are insane, the sane must go to the hospital.
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When a child can be brought to tears, and not from fear of punishment, but from repentance he needs no chastisement. When the tears begin to flow from the grief of their conduct you can be sure there is an angel nestling in their heart.
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You need not tell all the truth, unless to those who a right to know it all, but let all you tell be truth.
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Had I the power, I would scatter libraries over the whole land, as the sower sows his wheat-field.
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Had I the power, I would scatter libraries over the whole land as the sower sows his wheatfield.
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NO error is infused into the young mind, to lie there dormant, or to be reproduced only when the subject of thought or action recurs to which the error belongs; but the error becomes a model or archetype, after whose likeness the active powers of the mind create a thousand other errors.
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The earth endured Christ's ministry only three years;--not three weeks after his real character and purposes were generally known.
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The soul of the truly benevolent man does not seem to reside much in his own body. Its life, to a great extent, is a mere reflex of the lives of others. It migrates into their bodies, and identifying its existence with their existence, finds its own happiness in increasing and prolonging their pleasures, in extinguishing or solacing their pains.
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The pulpit only "teaches" to be honest; the market-place "trains" to overreaching and fraud; and teaching has not a tithe of the efficiency of training. Christ never wrote a tract, but He went about doing good.
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On entering this world our starting-point is ignorance. None, however, but idiots remain there.
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So, in the infinitely nobler battle in which you are engaged against error and wrong, if ever repulsed or stricken down, may you always be solaced and cheered by the exulting cry of triumph over some abuse in Church or State, some vice or folly in society, some false opinion or cruelty or guilt which you have overcome! And I beseech you to treasure up in your hearts these my parting words: Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.
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We conceive of immortality as having a beginning, but no end; but we conceive of eternity as having neither beginning nor end. Hence it is proper to speak of eternity as the attribute of God, but of immortality as the attribute of man.
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In our country and in our times no man is worthy the honored name of statesman who does not include the highest practicable education of the people in all his plans of administration. He may have eloquence, he may have a knowledge of all history, diplomacy, jurisprudence; and by these he might claim, in other countries, the elevated rank of a statesman: but unless he speaks, plans, labors, at all times and in all places, for the culture and edification of the whole people, he is not, he cannot be, an American statesman.
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Even the choicest literature should be taken as the condiment, and not as the sustenance of life. It should be neither the warp nor the woof of existence, but only the flowery edging upon its borders.
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Of all "rights" which command attention at the present time among us, woman's rights seem to take precedence.
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After a child has arrived at the legal age for attending school,-whether he be the child of noble or of peasant,-the only two absolute grounds of exemption from attendance are sickness and death.
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Let the Common School be expanded to its capabilities, let it be worked with the efficiency of which it is susceptible, and nine tenths of the crimes in the penal code would become obsolete; the long catalogue of human ills would be abridged; men would walk more safely by day; every pillow would be more inviolate by night; property, life, and character held by a stronger tenure; all rational hopes respecting the future brightened.
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Resistance to improvement contradicts the noblest instincts of the race. It begets its opposite. The fanaticism of reform is only the raging of the accumulated waters caused by the obstructions which an ultra conservatism has thrown across the stream of progress; and revolution itself is but the sudden overwhelming and sweeping away of impediments that should have been seasonably removed.
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If ever there was a cause, if ever there can be a cause, worthy to be upheld by all of toil or sacrifice that the human heart can endure, it is the cause of Education. It has intrinsic and indestructible merits. It holds the welfare of mankind in its embrace, as the protecting arms of a mother hold her infant to her bosom. The very ignorance and selfishness which obstructs its path are the strongest arguments for its promotion, for it furnishes the only adequate means for their removal.
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There may be frugality which is not economy. A community, that withholds the means of education from its children, withholds the bread of life and starves their souls.
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In vain do they talk of happiness who never subdued an impulse in obedience to a principle. He who never sacrificed a present to a future good, or a personal to a general one, can speak of happiness only as the blind speak of color.
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In dress, seek the middle between foppery and shabbiness.
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Praise begets emulation,--a goodly seed to sow among youthful students.