Top 100 Horace Mann Quotes
#1. 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.
Horace Mann
#2. No man has the right to bring up children without surrounding them with books.
Horace Mann
#3. 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.
Horace Mann
#4. 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.
Horace Mann
#5. Let the public mind become corrupt, and all efforts to secure property, liberty, or life by the force of laws written on paper will be as vain as putting up a sign in an apple orchard to exclude canker worms.
Horace Mann
#6. 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.
Horace Mann
#7. 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.
Horace Mann
#8. Education is an organic necessity of a human being.
Horace Mann
#9. When will society, like a mother, take care of all her children?
Horace Mann
#10. 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.
Horace Mann
#11. Ideality is the avant-courier of the mind.
Horace Mann
#12. 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.
Horace Mann
#13. A teacher who is attempting to teach without inspiring the pupil with a desire to learn is hammering on cold iron.
Horace Mann
#14. Ignorance breeds monsters to fill up the vacancies of the soul that are unoccupied by the verities of knowledge.
Horace Mann
#15. New constellations of truth are daily discovered in the firmament of knowledge, and new stars are daily shining forth in each constellation.
Horace Mann
#16. 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.
Horace Mann
#17. On the face of it, it must be a bad cause which will not bear discussion. Truth seeks light instead of shunning it.
Horace Mann
#18. A human being is not attaining his full heights until he is educated.
Horace Mann
#20. 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.
Horace Mann
#21. A house without books is like a room without windows.
Horace Mann
#22. 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.
Horace Mann
#23. Schoolhouses are the republican line of fortifications.
Horace Mann
#24. 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.
Horace Mann
#25. Children learn to read by being in the presence of books.
Horace Mann
#26. Be careful never to retire to rest in a room not properly ventilated.
Horace Mann
#27. You may be liberal in your praise where praise is due: it costs nothing; it encourages much.
Horace Mann
#28. 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.
Horace Mann
#29. Love
that divine fire which was made to light and warm the temple of home
sometimes burns at unholy altars.
Horace Mann
#30. Injustice alone can shake down the pillars of the skies, and restore the reign of Chaos and Night.
Horace Mann
#31. 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.
Horace Mann
#32. He who shuts out truth, by the same act opens the door to all the error that supplies its place.
Horace Mann
#33. 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.
Horace Mann
#34. 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.
Horace Mann
#35. In trying to teach children a great deal in a short time, they are treated not as though the race they were to run was for life, but simply a three-mile heat.
Horace Mann
#36. No combatants are so unequally matched as when one is shackled with error, while the other rejoices in the self-demonstrability of truth.
Horace Mann
#37. Praise begets emulation,
a goodly seed to sow among youthful students.
Horace Mann
#38. The most precious wine is produced upon the sides of volcanoes. Now bold and inspiring ideals are only born of a clear head that stands over a glowing heart.
Horace Mann
#39. 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.
Horace Mann
#40. We do ourselves the most good doing something for others.
Horace Mann
#41. Want of occupation is the bane of both men and women, perhaps more especially of the latter.
Horace Mann
#42. 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.
Horace Mann
#43. 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.
Horace Mann
#44. 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.
Horace Mann
#45. If you can express yourself so as to be perfectly understood in ten words, never use a dozen.
Horace Mann
#46. 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.
Horace Mann
#47. 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.
Horace Mann
#48. We must be purposely kind and generous or we miss the best part of life's existence.
Horace Mann
#49. It is well to think well: it is divine to act well.
Horace Mann
#50. If you wish to write well, study the life about you,
life in the public streets.
Horace Mann
#51. A teacher should, above all things, first induce a desire in the pupil for the acquisition he wishes to impart.
Horace Mann
#52. Education alone can conduct us to that enjoyment which is, at once, best in quality and infinite in quantity.
Horace Mann
#53. 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.
Horace Mann
#54. Republics, one after another ... have perished from a want of intelligence and virtue in the masses of the people ...
Horace Mann
#55. We who are engaged in the sacred cause of education are entitled to look upon all parents as having given hostages to our cause.
Horace Mann
#56. Great knowledge is requisite to instruct those who have been well instructed, but still greater knowledge is requisite to instruct those who have been neglected.
Horace Mann
#57. False conclusions which have been reasoned out are infinitely worse than blind impulse.
Horace Mann
#58. Every event in this world is the effect of some precedent cause, and also the cause of some subsequent effect.
Horace Mann
#59. Education is our only political safety. Outside of this ark all is deluge.
Horace Mann
#60. Above all, let the poor hang up the amulet of temperance in their homes.
Horace Mann
#61. If any man seeks greatness, let him forget greatness and ask for truth, and he will find both.
Horace Mann
#62. The object of punishment is prevention from evil; it can never be made impulsive to good.
Horace Mann
#63. 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.
Horace Mann
#64. 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.
Horace Mann
#65. 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.
Horace Mann
#66. 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.
Horace Mann
#67. Seek not greatness, but seek truth and you will find both.
Horace Mann
#68. 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.
Horace Mann
#69. Evil and good are God's right hand and left.
Horace Mann
#70. Superiority to circumstances is one of the most prominent characteristics of great men.
Horace Mann
#72. The education already given to the people creates the necessity of giving them more.
Horace Mann
#73. Virtue is an angel, but she is a blind one, and must ask Knowledge to show her the pathway that leads to her goal.
Horace Mann
#74. The highest service we can perform for others is to help them help themselves.
Horace Mann
#75. 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.
Horace Mann
#76. Education is a capital to the poor man, and an interest to the rich man.
Horace Mann
#77. To pity distress is but human; to relieve it is Godlike.
Horace Mann
#78. Of all "rights" which command attention at the present time among us, woman's rights seem to take precedence.
Horace Mann
#79. He who dethrones the idea of law, bids chaos welcome in its stead.
Horace Mann
#80. 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.
Horace Mann
#81. 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.
Horace Mann
#82. I look upon Phrenology as the guide to philosophy and the handmaid of Christianity. Whoever disseminates true Phrenology is a public benefactor.
Horace Mann
#84. As all truth is from God, it necessarily follows that true science and true religion can never be at variance.
Horace Mann
#85. If temperance prevails, then education can prevail; if temperance fails, then education must fail.
Horace Mann
#86. Teaching isn't one-tenth as effective as training.
Horace Mann
#87. The living soul of man, once conscious of its power, cannot be quelled.
Horace Mann
#88. 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.
Horace Mann
#89. 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.
Horace Mann
#90. Ten men have failed from defect in morals, where one has failed from defect in intellect.
Horace Mann
#91. Knowledge is but an instrument, which the profligate and the flagitious may use as well as the brave and the just.
Horace Mann
#92. The earth endured Christ's ministry only three years;
not three weeks after his real character and purposes were generally known.
Horace Mann
#93. 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.
Horace Mann
#94. He who cannot resist temptation is not a man.
Horace Mann
#95. When you introduce into our schools a spirit of emulation, you have present the keenest spur admissible to the youthful intellect.
Horace Mann
#96. Habit can overcome anything but instinct, and can greatly modify even that.
Horace Mann
#97. 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.
Horace Mann
#98. Willmott has very tersely said that embellished truths are the illuminated alphabet of larger children.
Horace Mann
#99. Affectation hides three times as many virtues as charity does sins.
Horace Mann
#100. 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.
Horace Mann
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