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MANN, Horace Quotes
(1796-1859), American educator
I have never heard anything about the resolutions of the apostles, but a great deal about their acts.
It would be more honorable to our distinguished ancestors to praise them in words less, but in deeds to imitate them more.
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.
To pity distress is but human; to relieve it is Godlike.
Just in proportion as a man becomes good, divine, Christ-like, he passes out of the region of theorizing into the region of benevolent activities.—It is good to think well; it is divine to act well.
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.
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 a warrant against the inferior excitement of passions and vices.
To pity distress is but human; to relieve it is Godlike.
When a child can be brought to tears, not from fear of punishment, but from repentance for his offence, he needs no chastisement.—When the tears begin to flow from grief at one's own conduct, be sure there is an angel nestling in the bosom.
Let there be an entire abstinence from intoxicating drinks throughout this country during the period of a single generation, and a mob would be as impossible as combustion without oxygen.
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.
Education is our only political safety.—Outside of this ark all is deluge.
Schoolhouses are the republican line of fortifications.
A human being is not, in any proper sense, a human being till he is educated.
The pulpit teaches to be honest, the marketplace trains to overreaching and fraud—Teaching has not a tithe of the efficacy of example and training.
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.
If any man seeks for greatness, let him forget greatness and ask for truth, and he will find both.
Habit is a cable.—We weave a thread of it every day, and at last we cannot break it.
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 do of colors.
Ideality is only the avant-courier of the mind, and where that, in a healthy and normal state goes, I hold it to be a prophecy that realization can follow.
Let but the public mind once become 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 canker-worms.
We go by the major vote, and if the majority are insane, the sane must go to the hospital.
Manners easily and rapidly mature into morals.
It is more difficult, and calls for higher energies of soul, to live a martyr than to die one.
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.
Let there be an entire abstinence from intoxicating drinks throughout this country during the period of a single generation, and a mob would be as impossible as combustion without oxygen.
I restrict myself within bounds in saying, that, so far as I have observed in this life, ten men have failed from defect in morals where one has failed from defect in intellect.
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.
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.
The devil tempts men through their ambition, their cupidity or their appetite, until he comes to the profane swearer, whom he catches without any bait or reward.
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.
Jails and prisons are the complement of schools; so many less as you have of the latter, so many more you must have of the former.
The object of punishment is the prevention of evil; it can never be made impulsive to good.
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.
Reproof is a medicine like mercury or opium; if it be improperly administered, it will do harm instead of good.
The teacher who is attempting to teach without inspiring the pupil with a desire to learn is hammering on cold iron.
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.
If temperance prevails, then education can prevail; if temperance fails, then education must fail.
Above all, let the poor hang up the amulet of temperance in their homes.
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 rouse every muscle to its highest tension.
Keep one thing forever in view—the truth; and if you do this, though it may seem to lead you away from the opinions of men, it will assuredly conduct you to the throne of God.
You need not tell all the truth, unless to those who have a right to know it all. But let all you tell be truth.
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. Mere knowledge, on the other hand, like a Swiss mercenary, is ready to combat either in the ranks of sin or under the banners of righteousness—ready to forge cannon balls or to print New Testaments, to navigate a corsair's vessel or a missionary ship.
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