Horace Mann Quotations

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

A human being is not attaining his full heights until he is educated.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

Education then, beyond all other devices of human origin, is the great equalizer of the conditions of men, the balance-wheel of the social machinery.

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.

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

Doing nothing for others is the undoing of ourselves.

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. It is a wrong to his family. Children learn to read by being in the presence of books. The love of knowledge comes with reading and grows upon it. And the love of knowledge, in a young mind, is almost always a warrant against the inferior excitement of passions and vices.

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

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.

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.

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.

Education is our only political safety. Outside of this ark all is deluge.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

I think it's beginning to be very successful; it was always viewed as a long-term project,

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.

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.

Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for mankind

Two golden hours somewhere between sunrise and sunset. Both are set with 60 diamond minutes. No reward is offered. They are gone forever.

A house without books is like room without windows

As a government employee, I was always fighting for financial resources, new staff, new everything, ... (Now,) I have to make sacrifices every day (as a business owner).

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.

It is more difficult, and it calls for higher energies of soul, to live a martyr than to die one.

A house without books is like a room without windows.

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

Manners easily and rapidly mature into morals.

Republics, one after another . . . have perished from a want of intelligence and virtue in the masses of the people. . . .

Doing nothing for others is the undoing of one's self. We must be purposely kind and generous, or we miss the best part of existence. The heart that goes out of itself, gets large and full of joy. This is the great secret of the inner life. We do ourselves the most good doing something for others.

Keep one thing in view forever- the truth; and if you do this, though it may seem to lead you away from the opinion of men, it will assuredly conduct you to the throne of God.

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.

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

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.

Genius may conceive but patient labor must consummate

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

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.

The highest service we can perform for others is to help them help themselves.

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

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.

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.

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

You may as well borrow a person's money as his time.

School is the cheapest police.

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.

Above all, let the poor hang up the amulet of temperance in their homes.

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.

No combatants are so unequally matched as when one is shackled with error, while the other rejoices in the self-demonstrability of truth.

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

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

So multifarious are the different classes of truths, and so multitudinous the truths in each class, that it may be undoubtingly affirmed that no man has yet lived who could so much as name all the different classes and subdivisions of truths, and far less anyone who was acquainted with all the truths belonging to any one class. What wonderful extent, what amazing variety, what collective magnificence! And if such be the number of truths pertaining to this tiny ball of earth, how must it be in the incomprehensible immensity!

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

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

Be careful never to retire to rest in a room not properly ventilated.

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.

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

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

Truths, no matter how momentous or enduring, are nothing to the individual until he appreciates them, and feels their force, and acknowledges their sovereignty. He cannot bow to their majesty until he sees their power. All the blind then, and all the ignorant--that is, all the children--must be educated up to the point of perceiving and admitting the truth, and acting according to its mandates.

Whatever statesman or sage will effect reforms upon a gigantic or godlike scale must begin with the young.

Good books are to the young mind what the warming sun and the refreshing rain of spring are to the seeds which have lain dormant in the frosts of winter. They are more, for they may save from that which is worse than death, as well as bless with that which is better than life.

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

Reproof is a medicine, like mercury or opium; if it be improperly administered, it will do harm instead of good.

In dress, seek the middle between foppery and shabbiness.

Man ... has an inborn religious sentiment that whispers of a God to his inmost soul, as a shell taken from the deep yet echoes forever the ocean's roar.

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.

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

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.

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.

The false man is more false to himself than to any one else. He may despoil others, but himself is the chief loser. The world's scorn he might sometimes forget, but the knowledge of his own perfidy is undying.

Benevolence is a world of itself -- a world which mankind, as yet, have hardly begun to explore. We have, as it were, only skirted along its coasts for a few leagues, without penetrating the recesses, or gathering the riches of its vast interior.

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.

Where a love of natural beauty has been cultivated, all nature becomes a stupendous gallery, as much superior in form and in coloring to the choicest collections of human art, as the heavens are broader and loftier than the Louvre or the Vatican.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

True glory is a flame lighted at the skies.

Ideality is the avant-courier of the mind.

In what pagan nation was Moloch ever propitiated by such an unbroken and swift-moving procession of victims as are offered to this Moloch of Christendom, intemperance.

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

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.

The devil tempts men through their ambition, their cupidity, or their appetite, until he comes to the profane swearer, whom he clutches without any reward.

Manners are the root, laws only the trunk and branches. Manners are the archetypes of laws. Manners are laws in their infancy; laws are manners fully grown,--or, manners are children, which, when they grow up, become laws.

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

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.

Great books are written for Christianity much oftener than great deeds are done for it. City libraries tell us of the reign of Jesus Christ but city streets tell us of the reign of Satan.

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.

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

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