Horace Mann > Quotes

“A house without books is like a room without windows.”
― Horace Mann

“Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.”
― Horace Mann

“Doing nothing for others is the undoing of ourselves.”
― Horace Mann

“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

“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

“Give me a house furnished with books rather than furniture! Both, if you can, but books at any rate!”
― Horace Mann

“Ignorance breeds monsters to fill up the vacancies of the soul that are unoccupied by the verities of knowledge.”
― Horace Mann

“A teacher who is attempting to teach without inspiring the pupil with a desire to learn is hammering on cold iron.”
― Horace Mann

“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

“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

“If any man seeks greatness, let him forget greatness and ask for truth, and he will find both.”
― Horace Mann

“No man has the right to bring up children without surrounding them with books.”
― Horace Mann

“It is well to think well: it is divine to act well.”
― Horace Mann

“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

“Habit is a cable; we weave a thread of it each day, and at last we cannot break it.”
― Horace Mann

“Children learn to read by being in the presence of books.”
― Horace Mann

“Seek not greatness, but seek truth and you will find both.”
― Horace Mann

“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

“Books are the windows through which the soul looks out. A house without books is like a room without windows. No man has a right to bring up his children without surrounding them with books, if he has the means to buy them. It is a wrong to his family. He cheats them! Children learn to read by being in the presence of books. The love of knowledge comes with reading and grows upon it.”
― Horace Mann

“The laws of nature are sublime, but there is a moral sublimity before which the highest intelligences must kneel and adore. The laws by which the winds blow, and the tides of the ocean, like a vast clepsydra, measure, with inimitable exactness, the hours of ever-flowing time; the laws by which the planets roll, and the sun vivifies and paints; the laws which preside over the subtle combinations of chemistry, and the amazing velocities of electricity; the laws of germination and production in the vegetable and animal worlds, — all these, radiant with eternal beauty as they are, and exalted above all the objects of sense, still wane and pale before the Moral Glories that apparel the universe in their celestial light. The heart can put on charms which no beauty of known things, nor imagination of the unknown, can aspire to emulate. Virtue shines in native colors, purer and brighter than pearl, or diamond, or prism, can reflect. Arabian gardens in their bloom can exhale no such sweetness as charity diffuses. Beneficence is godlike, and he who does most good to his fellow-man is the Master of Masters, and has learned the Art of Arts. Enrich and embellish the universe as you will, it is only a fit temple for the heart that loves truth with a supreme love. Inanimate vastness excites wonder; knowledge kindles admiration, but love enraptures the soul. Scientific truth is marvellous, but moral truth is divine; and whoever breathes its air and walks by its light, has found the lost paradise. For him, a new heaven and a new earth have already been created. His home is the sanctuary of God, the Holy of Holies.”
― Horace Mann, A Few Thoughts For A Young Man

“The most important ingredient in the formula of success is knowing how to get along with other people.”
― Horace Mann

“Habits are like a cable. We weave a strand of it every day and soon it cannot be broken.”
― Horace Mann

“The most ignorant are the most conceited.”
― Horace Mann, Lectures On Education

“A house without books is like a room without windows. No man has a right to bring up his children without surrounding them with books, if he has the means to buy them.”
― Horace Mann

“Education is our only political safety. Outside of this ark, all is deluge.”
― Horace Mann

“The best teachers teach from the heart, not the book.”
― Horace Mann

“all the members of society have a direct interest in the manners of each of its individuals, because each one is a radiating point, the center of a circle which he fills with pleasure or annoyance, not only for those who voluntarily enter it but for those, who, in the promiscuous movements of society, are caught within its circumference.”
― Horace Mann, On the Art of Teaching

“Affectation hides three times as many virtues as charity does sins.”
― Horace Mann, Thoughts

“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

“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