Top 83 Harriet Martineau Quotes
#1. I loved, as I still love, the most monotonous life possible ...
Harriet Martineau
#2. Laws and customs may be creative of vice; and should be therefore perpetually under process of observation and correction: but laws and customs cannot be creative of virtue: they may encourage and help to preserve it; but they cannot originate it.
Harriet Martineau
#3. There is no theory of a God, of an author of Nature, of an origin of the Universe, which is not utterly repugnant to my faculties ...
Harriet Martineau
#4. I certainly had no idea how little faith Christians have in their own faith till I saw how ill their courage and temper can stand any attack on it.
Harriet Martineau
#5. Is it to be understood that the principles of the Declaration of Independence bear no relation to half of the human race?
Harriet Martineau
#6. The voice of a whole people goes up in the silent workings of an institution.
Harriet Martineau
#8. I saw no poor men, except a few intemperate ones. I saw some very poor women; but God and man know that the time has not come for women to make their injuries even heard of.
Harriet Martineau
#9. Public opinion, - a tyrant, sitting in the dark, wrapt up in mystification and vague terrors of obscurity; deriving power no one knows from whom ... - but irresistible in its power to quell thought, to repress action, to silence conviction ...
Harriet Martineau
#11. The clergy complain of the enormous spread of bold books, from the infidel tract to the latest handling of the miracle question.
Harriet Martineau
#12. The Penny Post will do more for the circulation of ideas, for the fostering of domestic affections, for the humanizing of the mass generally, than any other single measure that our national wit can devise.
Harriet Martineau
#13. The sum and substance of female education in America, as in England, is training women to consider marriage as the sole object in life, and to pretend that they do not think so.
Harriet Martineau
#14. School is no place of education for any children whatever till their minds are well put in action. This is the work which has to be done at home, and which may be done in all homes where the mother is a sensible woman.
Harriet Martineau
#15. It is hard to tell which is worse; the wide diffusion of things that are not true, or the suppression of things that are true.
Harriet Martineau
#16. All people interested in their work are liable to overrate their vocation. There may be makers of dolls' eyes who wonder how society would go on without them.
Harriet Martineau
#17. Women, like men, must be educated with a view to action, or their studies cannot be called education.
Harriet Martineau
#18. There are always principles to be depended upon in this matter of taxation ... Amidst the inconsistent, the bewildering representations offered, a certain number must be in accordance with true principles ...
Harriet Martineau
#19. If there is any country on earth where the course of true love may be expected to run smooth, it is America.
Harriet Martineau
#20. We are not responsible for our feelings, as we are for our principles and actions ... Our care, then, should be to look to our principles, and to avoid all anxiety about our emotions. Their nature can never be wrong where our course of action is right, and for their degree we are not responsible.
Harriet Martineau
#22. The instruction furnished is not good enough for the youth of such a country ... There is not even any systematic instruction given on political morals: an enormous deficiency in a republic.
Harriet Martineau
#23. Religion is a temper, not a pursuit. It is the moral atmosphere in which human beings are to live and move. Men do not live to breathe: they breathe to live.
Harriet Martineau
#24. The last degree of honesty has always been, and is still considered incompatible with statesmanship. To hunger and thirst after righteousness has been naturally, as it were, supposed a disqualification for affairs ...
Harriet Martineau
#25. But is it not the fact that religion emanates from the nature, from the moral state of the individual? Is it not therefore true that unless the nature be completely exercised, the moral state harmonized, the religion cannot be healthy?
Harriet Martineau
#26. It is my deliberate opinion that the one essential requisite of human welfare in all ways is scientific knowledge of human nature.
Harriet Martineau
#27. It is the worst humiliation and grievance of the suffering, that they cause suffering.
Harriet Martineau
#28. A soul preoccupied with great ideas best performs small duties.
Harriet Martineau
#29. [On being deaf:] We must struggle for whatever may be had, without encroaching on the comfort of others.
Harriet Martineau
#31. Goodness and simplicity are indissolubly united.-The bad are the most sophisticated, all the world over, and the good the least.
Harriet Martineau
#32. The habit of dwelling on the past, has a narrowing as well as a debilitating influence. Behind us, there is a small, - an almost insignificant measure of time; before us, there is an eternity. It is the natural tendency of the mind to magnify the one, and to diminish the other ...
Harriet Martineau
#33. The progression of emancipation of any class usually, if not always, takes place through the efforts of individuals of that class.
Harriet Martineau
#34. Leisure, some degree of it, is necessary to the health of every man's spirit.
Harriet Martineau
#35. I never did a right thing or abstained from a wrong one from any consideration of reward or punishment.
Harriet Martineau
#36. I wrote because I could not help it. There was something that I wanted to say, and I said it: that was all. The fame and the money and the usefulness might or might not follow. It was not by my endeavor if they did.
Harriet Martineau
#37. What office is there which involves more responsibility, which requires more qualifications, and which ought, therefore, to be more honorable than teaching?
Harriet Martineau
Harriet Martineau
#38. The sick-room becomes the scene of intense convictions; and among these, none, it seems to me, is more distinct and powerful than that of the permanent nature of good, and the transient nature of evil.
Harriet Martineau
#39. It is a testament to the strength and purity of the democratic sentiment in the country, that the republic has not been overthrown by its newspapers.
Harriet Martineau
#40. You better live your best and act your best and think your best today, for today is the sure preparation for tomorrow and all the other tomorrows that follow.
Harriet Martineau
#41. Any one must see at a glance that if men and women marry those whom they do not love, they must love those whom they do not marry.
Harriet Martineau
#42. Wherever the appearance of a conventional aristocracy exists in America, it must arise from wealth, as it cannot from birth. An aristocracy of mere wealth is vulgar everywhere. In a republic, it is vulgar in the extreme.
Harriet Martineau
#43. Authorship has never been with me a matter of choice. I have not done it for amusement, or for money, or for fame, or for any reason but because I could not help it.
Harriet Martineau
#44. I romanced internally about early death till it was too late to die early ...
Harriet Martineau
#45. [I] wish that the land-tax went a little more according to situation than it does. 'Tis really ridiculous, how one has to pay five times as much as another, without any reason that ever I heard tell.
Harriet Martineau
#46. We do not believe in immortality because we can prove it, but we try to prove it because we cannot help believing it.
Harriet Martineau
#48. Happiness consists in the full employment of our faculties in some pursuit.
Harriet Martineau
#49. I am sure that no traveler seeing things through author spectacles can see them as they are.
Harriet Martineau
#50. It never enters the lady's head that the wet-nurse's baby probably dies.
Harriet Martineau
#51. Scarcely anything that I observed in the United States caused me so much sorrow as the contemptuous estimate of the people entertained by those who were bowing the knee to be permitted to serve them.
Harriet Martineau
#52. I think that few people are aware how early it is right to respect the modesty of an infant.
Harriet Martineau
#53. As new discoveries are causing all-penetrating physical lights so to abound as that, as has been said, we shall soon not know where in the world to get any darkness, so our new facilities for every sort of communication work to reduce privacy much within its former limits.
Harriet Martineau
#54. My own feeling of concern arises from seeing how much moral injury and suffering is created by the superstitions of the Christian mythology.
Harriet Martineau
#55. The highest condition of the religious sentiment is when ... the worshiper not only sees God everywhere, but sees nothing which is not full of God.
Harriet Martineau
#56. This noble word [women], spirit-stirring as it passes over English ears, is in America banished, and 'ladies' and 'females' substituted: the one to English taste mawkish and vulgar; the other indistinctive and gross.
Harriet Martineau
#57. Fidelity to conscience is inconsistent with retiring modesty. If it be so, let the modesty succumb. It can be only a false modesty which can be thus endangered.
Harriet Martineau
#58. Influence which is given on the side of money is usually against truth.
Harriet Martineau
#59. His subject is the "Origin of Species," & not the origin of Organization; & it seems a needless mischief to have opened the latter speculation at all.
Harriet Martineau
#60. In the United States, as elsewhere, there are, and have always been, two parties in politics ... It is remarkable how nearly their positive statements of political doctrine agree, while they differ in almost every possible application of their common principles.
Harriet Martineau
#61. Keep innocency, and take heed unto the thing that is right, for that shall bring a man peace at the last.
Harriet Martineau
#62. [Americans] have realized many things for which the rest of the world is still struggling ... [yet] the civilization and the morals of the Americans fall far below their own principles.
Harriet Martineau
#63. Who is apt, on occasion, to assign a multitude of reasons when one will do? This is a sure sign of weakness in argument.
Harriet Martineau
#64. The lesson taught us by these kindly commentators on my present experience is that dogmatic faith compels the best minds and hearts to narrowness and insolence.
Harriet Martineau
#65. While feeling far less injured by toil than my friends took for granted I must be, I yet was always aware of the strong probability that my life would end as the lives of hard literary workers usually end, - in paralysis, with months or years of imbecility.
Harriet Martineau
#66. For my own part, I had rather suffer any inconvenience from having to work occasionally in chambers and kitchen ... than witness the subservience in which the menial class is held in Europe.
Harriet Martineau
#67. There is no death to those who perfectly love-only disappearance, which in time may be borne.
Harriet Martineau
#68. I have no sympathy for those who, under any pressure of circumstances, sacrifice their heart's-love for legal prostitution.
Harriet Martineau
#69. If a test of civilization be sought, none can be so sure as the condition of that half of society over which the other half has power.
Harriet Martineau
#70. My business in life has been to think and learn, and to speak out with absolute freedom what I have thought and learned. The freedom is itself a positive and never-failing enjoyment to me, after the bondage of my early life.
Harriet Martineau
#71. The imagination, once awakened, must and will work, and ought to work
Harriet Martineau
#72. I want to be a free rover on the breezy common of the universe.
Harriet Martineau
#73. I would not exchange my freedom from old superstition, if I were to be burned at the stake next month, for all the peace and quiet of orthodoxy, if I must take the orthodoxy with peace and quiet.
Harriet Martineau
#74. Marriage ... is still the imperfect institution it must remain while women continue to be ill-educated, passive, and subservient ...
Harriet Martineau
#75. There have been few things in my life which have had a more genial effect on my mind than the possession of a piece of land
Harriet Martineau
#76. Men who pass most comfortably through this world are those who possess good digestions and hard hearts.
Harriet Martineau
#78. The last thing it [government] ought to do is to ground its proceedings on the ignorance of the people, - to yield them that which they will hereafter despise the donors for granting them.
Harriet Martineau
#79. A Queen, or a Prime Minister's secretary may be shot at in London, as we know; and probably there is no person eminent in literature or otherwise who has not been the object of some infirm brain or another. But in America the evil is sadly common.
Harriet Martineau
#80. Even if their outward fortunes could be absolutely equalized, there would be, from individual constitution alone, an aristocracy and a democracy in every land. The fearful by nature would compose an aristocracy, the hopeful by nature a democracy, were all other causes of divergence done away.
Harriet Martineau
#81. If the national mind of America be judged of by its legislation, it is of a very high order ... If the American nation be judged of by its literature, it may be pronounced to have no mind at all.
Harriet Martineau
#82. Self-denial is taught much better by inspiring the love of our neighbor, than by the prohibition of innocent comforts and pleasures. Spirituality is much better taught by making spiritual things the objects of supreme desire, than by commanding an ostentatious avoidance of the enjoyments of life.
Harriet Martineau
#83. [On being deaf:] How much less pain there is in calmly estimating the enjoyments from which we must separate ourselves, of bravely saying, for once and for ever, 'Let them go,' than in feeling them waste and dwindle, till their very shadows escape from our grasp!
Harriet Martineau
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