Top 100 Quotes About Horace Mann
#1. A HABIT IS A CABLE; WE WEAVE A THREAD EACH DAY, AND AT LAST WE CANNOT BREAK IT." - Horace Mann
Jack Canfield
#2. Until you have done something for humanity," wrote the great American educator Horace Mann, "you should be ashamed to die.
Christopher Hitchens
#3. If any man seeks for greatness, let him forget greatness and ask for truth, and he will find both." -- Horace Mann
Andy McWain
#4. My father died when I was young, and my mother, Ruth, went to work in an office selling theater and movie parties. She put me through private school, Horace Mann, in Riverdale. She sent me to camp so that I would learn to compete. She was a lioness, and I was her cub.
Alan Furst
#5. 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
#6. Good books are to the young mind what the warming sun and the refreshing rain of spring are to the seeds which have lain dormant in the frosts of winter. They are more, for they may save from that which is worse than death, as well as bless with that which is better than life.
Horace Mann
#7. No man has the right to bring up children without surrounding them with books.
Horace Mann
#8. 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
#9. An ignorant man is always able to say yes or no immediately to any proposition. To a wise man, comparatively few things can be propounded which do not require a response with qualifications, with discriminations, with proportion.
Horace Mann
#10. Where a love of natural beauty has been cultivated, all nature becomes a stupendous gallery, as much superior in form and in coloring to the choicest collections of human art, as the heavens are broader and loftier than the Louvre or the Vatican.
Horace Mann
#11. 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
#12. Education must bring the practice as nearly as possible to the theory. As the children now are, so will the sovereigns soon be.
Horace Mann
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. Education is an organic necessity of a human being.
Horace Mann
#17. If an idiot were to tell you the same story every day for a year, you would end by believing it.
Horace Mann
#18. Bodies are cleansed by water; the mind is purified by truth.
Horace Mann
#19. When will society, like a mother, take care of all her children?
Horace Mann
#20. 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
#21. It would be more honourable to our distinguished ancestors to praise them in words less, but in deeds to imitate them more.
Horace Mann
#22. Give me a house furnished with books rather than furniture! Both, if you can, but books at any rate!
Horace Mann
#23. Ideality is the avant-courier of the mind.
Horace Mann
#24. 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
#25. A teacher who is attempting to teach without inspiring the pupil with a desire to learn is hammering on cold iron.
Horace Mann
#26. If ever there was a cause, if ever there can be a cause, worthy to be upheld by all of toil or sacrifice that the human heart can endure, it is the cause of Education.
Horace Mann
#27. Ignorance breeds monsters to fill up the vacancies of the soul that are unoccupied by the verities of knowledge.
Horace Mann
#28. Those who exert the first influence upon the mind have the greatest power.
Horace Mann
#29. New constellations of truth are daily discovered in the firmament of knowledge, and new stars are daily shining forth in each constellation.
Horace Mann
#30. 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.
Horace Mann
#31. Manners are the root, laws only the trunk and branches. Manners are the archetypes of laws. Manners are laws in their infancy; laws are manners fully grown,
or, manners are children, which, when they grow up, become laws.
Horace Mann
#32. 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
#33. 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
#34. A human being is not attaining his full heights until he is educated.
Horace Mann
#35. 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.
Horace Mann
#36. Common sense is better than genius, and hence its bestowment is more universal.
Horace Mann
#37. 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.
Horace Mann
#38. Let us not be content to wait and see what will happen, but give us the determination to make the right things happen
Horace Mann
#40. 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
#41. A house without books is like a room without windows.
Horace Mann
#42. 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
#43. Schoolhouses are the republican line of fortifications.
Horace Mann
#44. 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
#45. Avoid witticisms at the expense of others.
Horace Mann
#46. Children learn to read by being in the presence of books.
Horace Mann
#47. Be careful never to retire to rest in a room not properly ventilated.
Horace Mann
#48. You may be liberal in your praise where praise is due: it costs nothing; it encourages much.
Horace Mann
#49. We conceive of immortality as having a beginning, but no end; but we conceive of eternity as having neither beginning nor end. Hence it is proper to speak of eternity as the attribute of God, but of immortality as the attribute of man.
Horace Mann
#50. 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
#51. We go by the major vote, and if the majority are insane, the sane must go to the hospital.
Horace Mann
#52. Time is a seedfield; in youth we sow it with causes; in after life we reap the harvest of effects.
Horace Mann
#53. Love
that divine fire which was made to light and warm the temple of home
sometimes burns at unholy altars.
Horace Mann
#54. Injustice alone can shake down the pillars of the skies, and restore the reign of Chaos and Night.
Horace Mann
#55. 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.
Horace Mann
#56. Every nerve that can thrill with pleasure, can also agonize with pain.
Horace Mann
#57. 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
#58. He who shuts out truth, by the same act opens the door to all the error that supplies its place.
Horace Mann
#59. 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
#60. True glory is a flame lighted at the skies.
Horace Mann
#61. 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.
Horace Mann
#62. Whatever statesman or sage will effect reforms upon a gigantic or godlike scale must begin with the young.
Horace Mann
#63. 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
#64. 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
#65. 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
#66. Praise begets emulation,
a goodly seed to sow among youthful students.
Horace Mann
#67. 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
#68. 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
#69. Great books are written for Christianity much oftener than great deeds are done for it. City libraries tell us of the reign of Jesus Christ but city streets tell us of the reign of Satan.
Horace Mann
#70. We do ourselves the most good doing something for others.
Horace Mann
#71. 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.
Horace Mann
#72. Want of occupation is the bane of both men and women, perhaps more especially of the latter.
Horace Mann
#73. 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
#74. 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
#75. 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
#76. If you can express yourself so as to be perfectly understood in ten words, never use a dozen.
Horace Mann
#77. 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
#78. 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
#79. It is more difficult, and it calls for higher energies of soul, to live a martyr than to die one.
Horace Mann
#80. We must be purposely kind and generous or we miss the best part of life's existence.
Horace Mann
#81. Doing nothing for others is the undoing of ourselves.
Horace Mann
#82. It is well to think well: it is divine to act well.
Horace Mann
#83. If you wish to write well, study the life about you,
life in the public streets.
Horace Mann
#84. Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.
Horace Mann
#85. A teacher should, above all things, first induce a desire in the pupil for the acquisition he wishes to impart.
Horace Mann
#86. Education alone can conduct us to that enjoyment which is, at once, best in quality and infinite in quantity.
Horace Mann
#87. 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
#88. God draweth straight lines but we call them crooked.
Horace Mann
#89. 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.
Horace Mann
#90. Republics, one after another ... have perished from a want of intelligence and virtue in the masses of the people ...
Horace Mann
#91. Habit is a cable; we weave a thread of it each day, and at last we cannot break it.
Horace Mann
#92. 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
#93. On entering this world our starting-point is ignorance. None, however, but idiots remain there.
Horace Mann
#94. Had I the power, I would scatter libraries over the whole land, as the sower sows his wheat-field.
Horace Mann
#95. 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.
Horace Mann
#96. 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
#97. False conclusions which have been reasoned out are infinitely worse than blind impulse.
Horace Mann
#98. Every event in this world is the effect of some precedent cause, and also the cause of some subsequent effect.
Horace Mann
#99. In dress, seek the middle between foppery and shabbiness.
Horace Mann
#100. Education is our only political safety. Outside of this ark all is deluge.
Horace Mann
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