Inspirational Quotations

Inspirational Quotes by Harriet Martineau (English Sociologist)

Harriet Martineau (1802–76) was a prolific British essayist, novelist, journalist, and economic and historical writer. A well-known intellectual of her time, she was celebrated as an abolitionist, antitheist, and life-long feminist. She was the sister of the English religious philosopher James Martineau.

Born in Norwich, Norfolk, England, Martineau triumphed over much adversity in life. Armed with brilliant childhood education, she had to overcome deafness, the loss of her senses of smell and taste, widespread nervous disorder, and, ultimately, heart disease.

Martineau became a successful author with a series of stories popularizing classical economics titled Illustrations of Political Economy and Poor Laws and Paupers Illustrated (9 vols., 1833–34.) After a visit to the United States 1834–36, she wrote the shrewdly sociological Society in America (1837.) In Retrospect of Western Travel (1838,) she promoted the then-unpopular abolition movement. She wrote her best-known novels, including Deerbrook (1839) and The Hour and the Man (1841,) during this period.

Martineau’s most scholarly work is The Positive Philosophy of Auguste Comte, Freely Translated and Condensed (2 vols., 1853,) her version of Comte’s Cours de philosophie positive (6 vol., 1830–42.) After a study of the evolution of religions, Martineau became increasingly skeptical of religious beliefs, including her own liberal Unitarianism, and her avowal of atheism in the Letters on the Laws of Man’s Nature and Development (1851) caused widespread shock.

Martineau’s chief historical work, The History of the Thirty Years’ Peace, A.D. 1816–46 (1849,) was very popular. She also contributed voluminously to periodicals such as the Daily News; her writings were collected in Biographical Sketches (1869.)

Martineau’s Autobiographical Memoir (3 vols., 1877) was published posthumously.

More: Wikipedia READ: Works by Harriet Martineau

A soul occupied with great ideas best performs small duties.
Harriet Martineau
Topics: Ideas

Religion is a temper, not a pursuit.
Harriet Martineau
Topics: Religion

Readers are plentiful: thinkers are rare.
Harriet Martineau
Topics: Books, Reading

You had 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
Topics: Follow, The Present

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
Topics: Women

Goodness and simplicity are indissolubly united.—The bad are the most sophisticated, all the world over, and the good the least.
Harriet Martineau
Topics: Simplicity

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
Topics: Marriage

What office is there which involves more responsibility, which requires more qualifications, and which ought, therefore, to be more honourable, than that of teaching?
Harriet Martineau
Topics: Teachers, Teaching

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
Topics: Marriage

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
Topics: Modesty, Humility

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
Topics: Service, Servants

Happiness consists in the full employment of our faculties in some pursuit.
Harriet Martineau

It is my deliberate opinion that the one essential requisite of human welfare in all ways is scientific knowledge of human nature.
Harriet Martineau
Topics: Welfare

Must love be ever treated with profaneness as a mere illusion? or with coarseness as a mere impulse? or with fear as a mere disease? or with shame as a mere weakness? or with levity as a mere accident? whereas it is a great mystery and a great necessity, lying at the foundation of human existence, morality, and happiness,—mysterious, universal, inevitable as death.
Harriet Martineau
Topics: Love

As for the just and noble idea, that nations, as well as individuals, are parts of one wondrous whole, it has hardly passed the lips or pen of any but religious men and poets.—It is the one great principle of the greatest religion which has ever nourished the morals of mankind.
Harriet Martineau
Topics: Nations

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
Topics: Religion

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
Topics: Lawyers, Law

If there is any country on earth where the course of true love may be expected to run smooth, it is America.
Harriet Martineau
Topics: Love

Ballads and popular songs are both the cause and effect of general morals; they are first formed, and then react.—In both points of view they are an index of public morals.
Harriet Martineau

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