Harriet Martineau
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.Collection: Marriage
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.Collection: Best
I am sure that no traveler seeing things through author spectacles can see them as they are.
The progression of emancipation of any class usually, if not always, takes place through the efforts of individuals of that class.
A soul occupied with great ideas performs small duties.
There have been few things in my life which have had a more genial effect on my mind than the possession of a piece of land.
Men who pass most comfortably through this world are those who possess good digestions and hard hearts.
Religion is a temper, not a pursuit.
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.
What office is there which involves more responsibility, which requires more qualifications, and which ought, therefore, to be more honorable, than that of teaching?
If there is any country on earth where the course of true love may be expected to run smooth, it is America.
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.
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.
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?
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.
A soul preoccupied with great ideas best performs small duties.
We do not believe in immortality because we can prove it, but we try to prove it because we cannot help believing it.
It is my deliberate opinion that the one essential requisite of human welfare in all ways is scientific knowledge of human nature.
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.
Women, like men, must be educated with a view to action, or their studies cannot be called education.Collection: Education
It is hard to tell which is worse; the wide diffusion of things that are not true, or the suppression of things that are true.Collection: Truth
Readers are plentiful; thinkers are rare.Collection: Funny Inspirational
Marriage ... is still the imperfect institution it must remain while women continue to be ill-educated, passive, and subservient.Collection: Imperfect
All women should inform themselves of the condition of their sex and of their own position. It must necessarily follow that the noblest of them will, sooner or later, put forth a moral power which shall prostrate cant, and burst asunder the bonds (silken to some but cold iron to others) of feudal prejudice and usages. In the meantime is it to be understood that the principles of the Declaration of Independence bear no relation to half of the human race? If so, what is the ground of this limitation?Collection: Sex
it matters infinitely less what we do than what we are.Collection: Identity
It is characteristic of genius to be hopeful and aspiring.Collection: Hopeful
influence which is given on the side of money is usually against truth.Collection: Truth
The imagination, once awakened, must and will work, and ought to workCollection: Imagination
I saw no poor men, except a few intemperate ones. I saw some very poor women; but God and man know that the time has not come for women to make their injuries even heard of.Collection: Men
I certainly had no idea how little faith Christians have in their own faith till I saw how ill their courage and temper can stand any attack on it.Collection: Christian
Happiness consists in the full employment of our faculties in some pursuit.Collection: Employment
We are not responsible for our feelings, as we are for our principles and actions. ... Our care, then, should be to look to our principles, and to avoid all anxiety about our emotions. Their nature can never be wrong where our course of action is right, and for their degree we are not responsible.Collection: Anxiety
My business in life has been to think and learn, and to speak out with absolute freedom what I have thought and learned. The freedom is itself a positive and never-failing enjoyment to me, after the bondage of my early life.Collection: Thinking
My own feeling of concern arises from seeing how much moral injury and suffering is created by the superstitions of the Christian mythology.Collection: Christian
Leisure, some degree of it, is necessary to the health of every man's spirit.Collection: Men
I romanced internally about early death till it was too late to die early.Collection: Too Late
I want to be a free rover on the breezy common of the universe.Collection: Freedom
it is a testament to the strength and purity of the democratic sentiment in the country, that the republic has not been overthrown by its newspapers.Collection: Country
The last degree of honesty has always been, and is still considered incompatible with statesmanship. To hunger and thirst after righteousness has been naturally, as it were, supposed a disqualification for affairs.Collection: Honesty
Everything but truth becomes loathed in a sick-room ... Let the nurse avow that the medicine is nauseous. Let the physician declare that the treatment will be painful. Let sister, or brother, or friend, tell me that I must never look to be well. When the time approaches that I am to die, let me be told that I am to die, and when.Collection: Brother
[On being deaf:] We must struggle for whatever may be had, without encroaching on the comfort of others.Collection: Struggle
it is the worst humiliation and grievance of the suffering, that they cause suffering.Collection: Suffering
The clergy complain of the enormous spread of bold books, from the infidel tract to the latest handling of the miracle question.Collection: Book
In the United States, as elsewhere, there are, and have always been, two parties in politics ... It is remarkable how nearly their positive statements of political doctrine agree, while they differ in almost every possible application of their common principles.Collection: Party
It is not quite true that there are no good letters written in America: among my own circle of correspondents there, there are ladies and gentlemen whose letters would stand a comparison with any for frankness, grace, and epistolary beauty of every kind. But I am not aware of any medium between this excellence and the boarding-school insignificance which characterizes the rest.Collection: School
A Queen, or a Prime Minister's secretary may be shot at in London, as we know; and probably there is no person eminent in literature or otherwise who has not been the object of some infirm brain or another. But in America the evil is sadly common.Collection: Queens
The instruction furnished is not good enough for the youth of such a country ... There is not even any systematic instruction given on political morals: an enormous deficiency in a republic.Collection: Education
if I believed that the choice lay between a sacrifice of the completest order of biography and that of the inviolability of private epistolary correspondence, I could not hesitate for a moment. I would keep the old and precious privacy,-the inestimable right of every one who has a friend and can write to him, - I would keep our written confidence from being made biographical material, as anxiously as I would keep our spoken conversation from being noted down for the good of society.Collection: Writing
When once experience taught me that I could work when I chose, and within a quarter of an hour of my determining to do so, I was relieved, in a great measure, from those embarrassments and depressions which I see afflicting many an author who waits for a mood instead of summoning it, and is the sport, instead of the master, of his own impressions and ideas.Collection: Sports
The lesson taught us by these kindly commentators on my present experience is that dogmatic faith compels the best minds and hearts to narrowness and insolence.Collection: Heart