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
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot American Sociologist
- Charles Cooley American Sociologist
- Charlotte Perkins Gilman American Feminist, Writer
- Ouida (Maria Louise Rame) English Novelist
- Percy Bysshe Shelley English Poet
- Virginia Woolf English Novelist
- Algernon Charles Swinburne English Poet
- Iris Murdoch British Novelist, Philosopher
- Herbert Spencer English Polymath
- Anne Bradstreet American Poet
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