Inspirational Quotations

Inspirational Quotes by Horace Mann (American Educator)

Horace Mann (1796–1859) was an American education reformist. As a politician he served in the Massachusetts House of Representatives from 1827 to 1833. He served in the Massachusetts Senate from 1834 to 1837. In 1848, after serving as Secretary of the Massachusetts State Board of Education since its creation, he was elected to the US House of Representatives. Mann was a brother-in-law to author Nathaniel Hawthorne.

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It is well to think well. It is divine to act well.
Horace Mann
Topics: Character

A human being is not, in any proper sense, a human being till he is educated.
Horace Mann
Topics: Education

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 do of colors.
Horace Mann
Topics: Happiness

It is more difficult, and calls for higher energies of soul, to live a martyr than to die one.
Horace Mann

Just in proportion as a man becomes good, divine, Christ-like, he passes out of the region of theorizing into the region of benevolent activities.—It is good to think well; it is divine to act well.
Horace Mann
Topics: Action, Benevolence

When a child can be brought to tears, and not from fear of punishment, but from repentance he needs no chastisement. When the tears begin to flow from the grief of their conduct you can be sure there is an angel nestling in their heart.
Horace Mann
Topics: Children, Correction, Reform

Ignorance breeds monsters to fill up the vacancies of the soul that are unoccupied by the verities of knowledge.
Horace Mann
Topics: Ignorance, Defects

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
Topics: Party, Principles

The great aim of human life
Horace Mann
Topics: Usefullness, One liners

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 teacher who is attempting to teach without inspiring the pupil with a desire to learn is hammering on cold iron.
Horace Mann
Topics: Teaching, Teachers

Manners easily and rapidly mature into morals.
Horace Mann
Topics: One liners, Manners

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
Topics: Punctuality

Education alone can conduct us to that enjoyment which is, at once, best in quality and infinite in quantity.
Horace Mann
Topics: Enjoyment

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 Management, Time

Avoid witicisms at the expense of others.
Horace Mann
Topics: Teamwork, Humor, Women, Mathematics, Success & Failure, Legacy, Wit

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
Topics: Reading, Value of Time, Time Management

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: Law, Morals, Morality

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

The greatest service we can perform for others is to help them to help themselves.
Horace Mann
Topics: Self-Discovery

Above all, let the poor hang up the amulet of temperance in their homes.
Horace Mann

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

Teaching isn’t one-tenth as effective as training.
Horace Mann
Topics: Teachers, Teaching

More will sometimes be demanded of you than is reasonable. Bear it meekly, and exhaust your time and strength in performing your duties, rather than in vindicating your rights. Be silent, even when you are misrepresented. Turn aside when opposed, rather than confront opposition with resistance. Bear and forbear, not defending yourselves, so much as trusting to your works to defend you. Yet, in counseling you thus, I would not be understood to be a total non-resistant; a perfectly passive, non-elastic sand-bag, in society; but I would not have you resist until the blow be aimed, not so much at you, as, through you, at the sacred cause of human improvement, in which you are engaged, a point at which forbearance would be allied to crime.
Horace Mann

Keep one thing forever in view—the truth; and if you do this, though it may seem to lead you away from the opinions of men, it will assuredly conduct you to the throne of God.
Horace Mann
Topics: Truth

Virtue is an angel; but she is a blind one and must ask of knowledge to show her the pathway that leads to her goal. Mere knowledge, on the other hand, like a Swiss mercenary, is ready to combat either in the ranks of sin or under the banners of righteousness—ready to forge cannon balls or to print New Testaments, to navigate a corsair’s vessel or a missionary ship.
Horace Mann
Topics: Virtue

Generosity during life is a very different thing from generosity in the hour of death; one proceeds from genuine liberality, and benevolence; the other from pride or fear, or from the fact that you cannot take your money with you to the other world.
Horace Mann
Topics: Generosity

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

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

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