Avoid witicisms at the expense of others.
—Horace Mann
Topics: Wit, Women, Teamwork, Mathematics, Humor, Legacy, Success & Failure
Habit is a cable.—We weave a thread of it every day, and at last we cannot break it.
—Horace Mann
Topics: Habits, Habit
False conclusions which have been reasoned out are infinitely worse than blind impulse.
—Horace Mann
Topics: Decisions
I restrict myself within bounds in saying, that, so far as I have observed in this life, ten men have failed from defect in morals where one has failed from defect in intellect.
—Horace Mann
Topics: Morality
To pity distress is but human; to relieve it is Godlike.
—Horace Mann
Topics: Charity
Let but the public mind once become thoroughly corrupt, and all attempts to secure property, liberty, or life, by mere force of laws written on parchment, will be as vain as to put up printed notices in an orchard to keep off canker-worms.
—Horace Mann
Topics: Morality, Law, Morals
In such a world as ours the idle man is not so much a biped as a bivalve; and the wealth which breeds idleness, of which the English peerage is an example, and of which we are beginning to abound in specimens in this country, is only a sort of human oyster bed, where heirs and heiresses are planted, to spend a contemptible life of slothfulness in growing plump and succulent for the grave-worms’ banquet.
—Horace Mann
Topics: Idleness
The great aim of human life
—Horace Mann
Topics: One liners, Usefullness
Education alone can conduct us to that enjoyment which is, at once, best in quality and infinite in quantity.
—Horace Mann
Topics: Enjoyment
The pulpit teaches to be honest, the marketplace trains to overreaching and fraud—Teaching has not a tithe of the efficacy of example and training.
—Horace Mann
Topics: Example
The object of punishment is the prevention of evil; it can never be made impulsive to good.
—Horace Mann
Topics: Punishment
Observation-activity of both eyes and ears.
—Horace Mann
Topics: Observation
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
Topics: Opinions, Opinion
Let there be an entire abstinence from intoxicating drinks throughout this country during the period of a single generation, and a mob would be as impossible as combustion without oxygen.
—Horace Mann
Topics: Drunkenness
Seek not greatness, but seek truth and you will find both.
—Horace Mann
Topics: Truth
You need not tell all the truth, unless to those who have a right to know it all. But let all you tell be truth.
—Horace Mann
Topics: Truth
Above all, let the poor hang up the amulet of temperance in their homes.
—Horace Mann
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
Topics: Truth, Progress
A human being is not, in any proper sense, a human being till he is educated.
—Horace Mann
Topics: Education
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
Topics: Value of Time, Time, Time Management
I have never heard anything about the resolutions of the apostles, but a great deal about their acts.
—Horace Mann
Topics: Action
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
Topics: Biography
A human being is not attaining his full heights until he is educated.
—Horace Mann
Topics: Education
It is well when the wise and the learned discover new truths; but how much better to diffuse the truths already discovered amongst the multitudes. Every addition to true knowledge is an addition to human power; and while a philosopher is discovering one new truth, millions of truths may be propagated amongst the people…. The whole land must be watered with the streams of knowledge.
—Horace Mann
Topics: Knowledge, Power
If any man seeks for greatness, let him forget greatness and ask for truth, and he will find both.
—Horace Mann
Topics: Posterity, Truth, Greatness
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
Education is our only political safety. Outside of this ark all is deluge.
—Horace Mann
Topics: Education, Safety
It would be more honorable to our distinguished ancestors to praise them in words less, but in deeds to imitate them more.
—Horace Mann
Topics: Ancestry
Scientific truth is marvelous, but moral truth is divine and whoever breathes its air and walks by its light has found the lost paradise.
—Horace Mann
Topics: Reason, Thought, Truth
Affectation hides three times as many virtues as charity does sins.
—Horace Mann
Topics: Affectation, Charity
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Anne Sullivan Macy American Educator
- Mortimer J. Adler American Philosopher, Educator
- Frank Moore Colby American Writer, Editor
- Robert Maynard Hutchins American Author, Academic
- Booker T. Washington African-American Educationist
- Robert H. Shaffer American Educator
- Laurence J. Peter American Author
- E. Merrill Root American Educator, Poet
- John Quincy Adams American Head of State
- Julia Abigail Fletcher Carney American Poet
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