Horace Mann Quotes

Time is a seedfield; in youth we sow it with causes; in after life we reap the harvest of effects.

It would be more honourable to our distinguished ancestors to praise them in words less, but in deeds to imitate them more.

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

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.

The most formidable attribute of temptation is its increasing power, its accelerating ratio of velocity. Every act of repetition increases power, diminishes resistance. It is like the letting out of waters-where a drop can go, a river can go. Whoever yields to temptation, subjects himself to the law of falling bodies.

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

We go by the major vote, and if the majority are insane, the sane must go to the hospital.

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.

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

Education is an organic necessity of a human being.

Genius may conceive but patient labor must consummate.

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.

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

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

There is a deeper pleasure in following truth to the scaffold or the cross, than in joining the multitudinous retinue, and mingling our shouts with theirs, when victorious error celebrates its triumphs.

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

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.

A republican form of government, without intelligence in the people, must be, on a vast scale, what a mad-house, without superintendent or keepers, would be on a small one.

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.

Enslave a man and you destroy his ambition, his enterprise, his capacity. In the constitution of human nature, the desire of bettering one's condition is the mainspring of effort. The first touch of slavery snaps this spring.

He who cannot resist temptation is not a man.

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.

Thank Heaven, the female heart is untenantable by atheism.

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

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

Every addition to true knowledge is an addition to human power.

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

There is nothing so costly as ignorance.

We who are engaged in the sacred cause of education are entitled to look upon all parents as having given hostages to our cause.

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

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.

Deeds survive the doers.

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.

Those who exert the first influence upon the mind have the greatest power.

Virtue is an angel, but she is a blind one, and must ask Knowledge to show her the pathway that leads to her goal.

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.

The Chinese have an excellent proverb: "Be modest in speech, but excel in action.

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.

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

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.

Let but the public mind become once thoroughly corrupt, and all attempts to secure property, liberty or life, by mere force of laws written on parchment, will be as vain as to put up printed notices in an orchard to keep off the canker-worms.

Under the Providence of God, our means of education are the grand machinery by which the 'raw material' of human nature can be worked up into inventors and discoverers, into skilled artisans and scientific farmers, into scholars and jurists, into the founders of benevolent institutions, and the great expounders of ethical and theological science.

When the panting and thirsting soul first drinks the delicious waters of truth, when the moral and intellectual tastes and desires first seize the fragrant fruits that flourish in the garden of knowledge, then does the child catch a glimpse and foretaste of heaven.

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

We do ourselves the most good doing something for others.

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.

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

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.