Top 100 Martineau Quotes
#1. Do you really think that I don't have anything better to do than to spend my time thinking about you? Digging up a little of the goods on Luc Martineau?"
Fine lines appeared at the corners of his eyes and he laughed. "Sweetheart, there is nothing little about Luc's goods.
Rachel Gibson
#2. 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
#3. God has so arranged the chronometry of our spirits, that there shall be thousands of silent moments between the striking hours.
James Martineau
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. Influence which is given on the side of money is usually against truth.
Harriet Martineau
#7. 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
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. 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
#11. 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
#12. Religion is the belief in an ever-living God, that is, in a Divine Mind and Will ruling the Universe and holding moral relations with mankind.
James Martineau
#13. I think that few people are aware how early it is right to respect the modesty of an infant.
Harriet Martineau
#14. 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
#15. It never enters the lady's head that the wet-nurse's baby probably dies.
Harriet Martineau
#16. I am sure that no traveler seeing things through author spectacles can see them as they are.
Harriet Martineau
#17. Happiness consists in the full employment of our faculties in some pursuit.
Harriet Martineau
#18. All beneficent and creative power gathers itself together in silence, ere it issues out in might.
James Martineau
#20. 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
#21. [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
#22. I romanced internally about early death till it was too late to die early ...
Harriet Martineau
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. 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
#26. 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
#27. 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
#28. 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
#29. Trust arises from the mind's instinctive feeling after fixed realities, after the substance of every shadow, the base of all appearance, the everlasting amid change.
James Martineau
#30. 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
#32. Men who pass most comfortably through this world are those who possess good digestions and hard hearts.
Harriet Martineau
#33. 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
#34. Marriage ... is still the imperfect institution it must remain while women continue to be ill-educated, passive, and subservient ...
Harriet Martineau
#36. 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
#37. I want to be a free rover on the breezy common of the universe.
Harriet Martineau
#38. The imagination, once awakened, must and will work, and ought to work
Harriet Martineau
#39. The incarnation is true, not of Christ exclusively, but of Man universally, and God everlastingly.
James Martineau
#40. The health of a community is an almost unfailing index of its morals.
James Martineau
#41. 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
#42. I have no sympathy for those who, under any pressure of circumstances, sacrifice their heart's-love for legal prostitution.
Harriet Martineau
#43. There is no death to those who perfectly love-only disappearance, which in time may be borne.
Harriet Martineau
#44. 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
#45. 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
#46. 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
#47. 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
#48. [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
#49. Keep innocency, and take heed unto the thing that is right, for that shall bring a man peace at the last.
Harriet Martineau
#50. 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
#51. I bow in reverence before the emotions of every melted heart ... The more intense the delight in their presence, the more poignant the impression of their absence ... When the tears of bereavement have had their natural flow, they lead us again to life and love's generous joy.
James Martineau
#52. 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
#54. All spiritual strength for ourselves, all noble ties to one another, have their real source in that inner sanctuary where God denies His lonely audience to none. Its secrets are holy; its asylum, inviolate; its consolations, sure; and all are open to the simple heart-word, Thou art my hiding-place.
James Martineau
#55. 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
#56. If there is any country on earth where the course of true love may be expected to run smooth, it is America.
Harriet Martineau
#57. 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
#58. Women, like men, must be educated with a view to action, or their studies cannot be called education.
Harriet Martineau
#59. We are each of us responsible for the evil we may have prevented.
James Martineau
#60. 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
#61. 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
#62. 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
#63. 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
#64. Every man's highest, nameless though it be, is his 'living God'.
James Martineau
#65. 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
#66. The clergy complain of the enormous spread of bold books, from the infidel tract to the latest handling of the miracle question.
Harriet Martineau
#68. 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
#69. 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
#71. The voice of a whole people goes up in the silent workings of an institution.
Harriet Martineau
#72. Is it to be understood that the principles of the Declaration of Independence bear no relation to half of the human race?
Harriet Martineau
#73. 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
#74. 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
#75. 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
#76. I loved, as I still love, the most monotonous life possible ...
Harriet Martineau
#77. When speech is given to a soul holy and true, time, and its dome of ages, becomes as a mighty whispering-gallery, round which the imprisoned utterance runs, and reverberates forever.
James Martineau
#78. The pinafore of the child will be more than a match for the frock of the bishop and the surplice of the priest.
James Martineau
#79. High hearts are never long without hearing some new call, some distant clarion of God, even in their dreams; and soon they are observed to break up the camp of ease, and start on some fresh march of faithful service.
James Martineau
#80. 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
#81. I never did a right thing or abstained from a wrong one from any consideration of reward or punishment.
Harriet Martineau
#82. There is no human life so poor and small as not to hold many a divine possibility.
James Martineau
#83. Leisure, some degree of it, is necessary to the health of every man's spirit.
Harriet Martineau
#84. The progression of emancipation of any class usually, if not always, takes place through the efforts of individuals of that class.
Harriet Martineau
#85. God is infinite; and the laws of nature, like nature itself, are finite. These methods of working, therefore, which correspond to the physical element in us, do not exhaust His agency. There is a boundless residue of disengaged energy beyond.
James Martineau
#86. 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
#87. Goodness and simplicity are indissolubly united.-The bad are the most sophisticated, all the world over, and the good the least.
Harriet Martineau
#88. There is no room in the universe for the least contempt or pride; but only for a gentle and a reverent heart.
James Martineau
#89. 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
#90. All that is noble in the world's past history, and especially the minds of the great and the good, are never lost.
James Martineau
#92. The scepticism which men affect towards their higher inspirations is often not an honest doubt, but a guilty negligence, and is a sign of narrow mind and defective wisdom.
James Martineau
#93. [On being deaf:] We must struggle for whatever may be had, without encroaching on the comfort of others.
Harriet Martineau
#94. A soul preoccupied with great ideas best performs small duties.
Harriet Martineau
#95. It is the worst humiliation and grievance of the suffering, that they cause suffering.
Harriet Martineau
#96. It is my deliberate opinion that the one essential requisite of human welfare in all ways is scientific knowledge of human nature.
Harriet Martineau
#97. Religion is no more possible without prayer than poetry without language, or music without atmosphere.
James Martineau
#98. 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
#99. 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
#100. 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
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