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.

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

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

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.

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).

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

Love must be the same in all worlds.

To know the machine one must know where each part belongs, and what its office is.

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.

Knowledge has its boundary line, where it abuts on ignorance; on the outside of that boundary line are ignorance and miracles; on the inside of it are science and no miracles.

Every nerve that can thrill with pleasure, can also agonize with pain.

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.

The living soul of man, once conscious of its power, cannot be quelled.

Some languages are musical in themselves, so that it is pleasant to hear any one read or converse in them, even though we do not understand a word that we hear.... Others are full of growling, snarling, hissing sounds, as though wild beasts and serpents had first taught the people to speak.

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

Deeds survive the doers.

Knowledge is a mimic creation.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Love not only occupies the higher lobes of the brain, but crowds out the lower to make room for its expansion.

Love--that divine fire which was made to light and warm the temple of home--sometimes burns at unholy altars.

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.

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.

Habit can overcome anything but instinct, and can greatly modify even that.

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

He who dethrones the idea of law, bids chaos welcome in its stead.

Avoid witticisms at the expense of others.

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

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

Observation - activity of both eyes and ears.

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.

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

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

A teacher should, above all things, first induce a desire in the pupil for the acquisition he wishes to impart.

He who cannot resist temptation is not a man.

Injustice alone can shake down the pillars of the skies, and restore the reign of Chaos and Night.

One thing I certainly never was made for, and that is to put principles on and off at the dictation of a party, as a lackey changes his livery at his master's command.

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

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?

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

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.

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

Want of occupation is the bane of both men and women, perhaps more especially of the latter.

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.

When will society, like a mother, take care of all her children?

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.

Education is an organic necessity of a human being.

Biography, especially of the great and good, who have risen by their own exertions to eminence and usefulness, is an inspiring and ennobling study. Its direct tendency is to reproduce the excellence it records.

We do ourselves the most good doing something for others.

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

You may be liberal in your praise where praise is due: it costs nothing; it encourages much.

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

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.

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.

It is well when the wise and the learned discover new truths; but how much better to diffuse the truths already discovered amongst the multitudes. Every addition to true knowledge is an addition to human power; and while a philosopher is discovering one new truth, millions of truths may be propagated amongst the people.... The whole land must be watered with the streams of knowledge.

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.

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

Give me a house furnished with books rather than furniture! Both, if you can, but books at any rate!

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

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

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.

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.

He who cannot resist temptation is not a man. Whoever yields to temptation debases himself with a debasement from which he can never arise.

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

There is nothing so costly as ignorance.

On entering this world our starting-point is ignorance. None, however, but idiots remain there.

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.

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.

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.

Affectation hides three times as many virtues as charity does sins.