Horace Mann Quotes

Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.

Let us not be content to wait and see what will happen, but give us the determination to make the right things happen

The most ignorant are the most conceited.

We are prone to seek immediate pleasure or good, however small, rather than remote pleasure or good, however vast.

Children learn to read by being in the presence of books.

The earth flourishes, or is overrun with noxious weeds and brambles, as we apply or withhold the cultivating hand. So fares it with the intellectual system of man.

Knowledge is but an instrument, which the profligate and the flagitious may use as well as the brave and the just.

Let us labor for that larger comprehension of truth, and that more thorough repudiation of error, which shall make the history of mankind a series of ascending developments.

God draweth straight lines but we call them crooked.

As an innovation ... the establishment of Free Schools was the boldest ever promulgated, since the commencement of the Christian era ... Time has ratified its soundness. Two centuries proclaim it to be as wise as it was courageous, as beneficient as it was disinterested. It was one of those grand mental and moral experiments ... The sincerity of our gratitude must be tested by our efforts to perpetuate and improve what they established. The gratitude of the lips only is an unholy offering.

Ten men have failed from defect in morals, where one has failed from defect in intellect.

The laws of nature are sublime, but there is a moral sublimity before which the highest intelligences must kneel and adore. The laws by which the winds blow, and the tides of the ocean, like a vast clepsydra, measure, with inimitable exactness, the hours of ever-flowing time; the laws by which the planets roll, and the sun vivifies and paints; the laws which preside over the subtle combinations of chemistry, and the amazing velocities of electricity; the laws of germination and production in the vegetable and animal worlds, - all these, radiant with eternal beauty as they are, and exalted above all the objects of sense, still wane and pale before the Moral Glories that apparel the universe in their celestial light. The heart can put on charms which no beauty of known things, nor imagination of the unknown, can aspire to emulate. Virtue shines in native colors, purer and brighter than pearl, or diamond, or prism, can reflect. Arabian gardens in their bloom can exhale no such sweetness as charity diffuses. Beneficence is godlike, and he who does most good to his fellow-man is the Master of Masters, and has learned the Art of Arts. Enrich and embellish the universe as you will, it is only a fit temple for the heart that loves truth with a supreme love. Inanimate vastness excites wonder; knowledge kindles admiration, but love enraptures the soul. Scientific truth is marvellous, but moral truth is divine; and whoever breathes its air and walks by its light, has found the lost pa

The most important ingredient in the formula of success is knowing how to get along with other people.

Scientific truth is marvelous, but moral truth is divine and whoever breathes its air and walks by its light has found the lost paradise.

If you can express yourself so as to be perfectly understood in ten words, never use a dozen.

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.

If an idiot were to tell you the same story every day for a year, you would end by believing it.

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.

Without undervaluing any other human agency, it may be safely affirmed that the Common School, improved and energized, as it can easily be, may become the most effective and benignant of all the forces of civilization. Two reasons sustain this position. In the first place, there is a universality in its operation, which can be affirmed of no other institution whatever ... And, in the second place, the materials upon which it operates are so pliant and ductile as to be susceptible of assuming a greater variety of forms than any other earthly work of the Creator.

There is nothing derogatory in any employment which ministers to the well-being of the race. It is the spirit that is carried into an employment that elevates or degrades it.

On the face of it, it must be a bad cause which will not bear discussion. Truth seeks light instead of shunning it.

Forts, arsenals, garrisons, armies, navies, are means of security and defence, which were invented in half-civilized times and in feudal or despotic countries; but schoolhouses are the republican line of fortifications, and if they are dismantled and dilapidated, ignorance and vice will pour in their legions through every breach.

Astronomy is one of the sublimest fields of human investigation. The mind that grasps its facts and principles receives something of the enlargement and grandeur belonging to the science itself. It is a quickener of devotion.

Teachers teach because they care. Teaching young people is what they do best. It requires long hours, patience, and care.

New constellations of truth are daily discovered in the firmament of knowledge, and new stars are daily shining forth in each constellation.

The object of punishment is prevention from evil; it can never be made impulsive to good.

It is well to think well: it is divine to act well.

It is far more difficult, I assure you, to live for the truth than to die for it.

To pity distress is but human; to relieve it is Godlike.

The education already given to the people creates the necessity of giving them more.

Education is a capital to the poor man, and an interest to the rich man.

Love must be the same in all worlds.

Habit is a cable; we weave a thread of it each day, and at last we cannot break it.

True glory is a flame lighted at the skies.

As all truth is from God, it necessarily follows that true science and true religion can never be at variance.

You need not tell all the truth, unless to those who have a right to know it; but let all you tell be truth.

Bodies are cleansed by water; the mind is purified by truth.

Common sense is better than genius, and hence its bestowment is more universal.

Manners easily and rapidly mature into morals.

He who cannot resist temptation is not a man.

Education is an organic necessity of a human being.

We must be purposely kind and generous or we miss the best part of life's existence.

Teaching isn't one-tenth as effective as training.

The most precious wine is produced upon the sides of volcanoes. Now bold and inspiring ideals are only born of a clear head that stands over a glowing heart.

Finally, in regard to those who possess the largest shares in the stock of worldly goods, could there, in your opinion, be any police so vigilant and effetive, for the protections of all the rights of person, property and character, as such a sound and comprehensive education and training, as our system of Common Schools could be made to impart; and would not the payment of a sufficient tax to make such education and training universal, be the cheapest means of self-protection and insurance?

To-day Massachusetts; and the whole of the American republic, from the border of Maine to the Pacific slopes, and from the Lakes to the Gulf, stand upon the immutable and everlasting principles of equal and exact justice. The days of unrequited labor are numbered with the past. Fugitive slave laws are only remembered as relics of that barbarism which John Wesley pronounced "the sum of all villainies," and whose knowledge of its blighting effects was matured by his travels in Georgia and the Carolinas.

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.

Praise begets emulation,
a goodly seed to sow among youthful students.

Seek not greatness, but seek truth and you will find both.

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.

In such a world as ours the idle man is not so much a biped as a bivalve; and the wealth which breeds idleness, of which the English peerage is an example, and of which we are beginning to abound in specimens in this country, is only a sort of human oyster bed, where heirs and heiresses are planted, to spend a contemptible life of slothfulness in growing plump and succulent for the grave-worms' banquet.

A teacher who is attempting to teach without inspiring the pupil with a desire to learn is hammering on cold iron.

Ideality is the avant-courier of the mind.

Patient perseverance in well doing is infinitely harder than a sudden and impulsive self-sacrifice.

Evil and good are God's right hand and left.

Education alone can conduct us to that enjoyment which is, at once, best in quality and infinite in quantity.

I look upon Phrenology as the guide to philosophy and the handmaid of Christianity. Whoever disseminates true Phrenology is a public benefactor.

Both poetry and philosophy are prodigal of eulogy over the mind which ransoms itself by its own energy from a captivity to custom, which breaks the common bounds of empire, and cuts a Simplon over mountains of difficulty for its own purposes, whether of good or of evil.

An ignorant man is always able to say yes or no immediately to any proposition. To a wise man, comparatively few things can be propounded which do not require a response with qualifications, with discriminations, with proportion.

They who set an example make a highway. Others follow the example, because it is easier to travel on a highway than over untrodden grounds.

When you introduce into our schools a spirit of emulation, you have present the keenest spur admissible to the youthful intellect.

Of all "rights" which command attention at the present time among us, woman's rights seem to take precedence.

Temptation is a fearful word. It indicates the beginning of a possible series of infinite evils. It is the ringing of an alarm bell, whose melancholy sounds may reverberate through eternity. Like the sudden, sharp cry of "Fire!" under our windows by night, it should rouse us to instantaneous action, and brace every muscle to its highest tension.

We do ourselves the most good doing something for others.

Education must bring the practice as nearly as possible to the theory. As the children now are, so will the sovereigns soon be.

There is not a good work which the hand of man has ever undertaken, which his heart has ever conceived, which does not require a good education for its helper.

In trying to teach children a great deal in a short time, they are treated not as though the race they were to run was for life, but simply a three-mile heat.

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.

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.

Observation - activity of both eyes and ears.

Ignorance has been well represented under the similitude of a dungeon, where, though it is full of life, yet darkness and silence reign. But in society the bars and locks have been broken; the dungeon itself is demolished; the prisoners are out; they are in the midst of us. We have no security but to teach and renovate them.

Willmott has very tersely said that embellished truths are the illuminated alphabet of larger children.

There is nothing so costly as ignorance.

Avoid witticisms at the expense of others.

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.

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.

Under the sublime law of progress, the present outgrows the past. The great heart of humanity is heaving with the hopes of a brighter day. All the higher instincts of our nature prophesy its approach; and the best intellects of the race are struggling to turn that prophecy into fulfilment.

If you wish to write well, study the life about you,
life in the public streets.

Education ... 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.

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.

As each generation comes into the world devoid of knowledge, its first duty is to obtain possession of the stores already amassed. It must overtake its predecessors before it can pass by them.

If there is anything for which I would go back to childhood, and live this weary life over again, it is for the burning, exalting, transporting thrill and ecstasy with which the young faculties hold their earliest communion with knowledge.

False conclusions which have been reasoned out are infinitely worse than blind impulse.

Spurn not at seeming error, but dig below its surface for the truth; And beware of seeming truths that grow on the roots of error.

As an apple is not in any proper sense an apple until it is ripe, so a human being is not in any proper sense a human being until he is educated.

Schoolhouses are the republican line of fortifications.

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.

Ignorance breeds monsters to fill up the vacancies of the soul that are unoccupied by the verities of knowledge.

Every event in this world is the effect of some precedent cause, and also the cause of some subsequent effect.

He who shuts out truth, by the same act opens the door to all the error that supplies its place.

Man is improvable. Some people think he is only a machine, and that the only difference between a man and a mill is, that one is carried by blood and the other by water.

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.

Had I the power, I would scatter libraries over the whole land, as the sower sows his wheat-field.

We put things in order - God does the rest. Lay an iron bar east and west, it is not magnetized. Lay it north and south and it is.

Thank Heaven, the female heart is untenantable by atheism.

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.

If any man seeks greatness, let him forget greatness and ask for truth, and he will find both.

If temperance prevails, then education can prevail; if temperance fails, then education must fail.

The earth endured Christ's ministry only three years;
not three weeks after his real character and purposes were generally known.

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.