Horace Mann
Scientific truth is marvelous, but moral truth is divine and whoever breathes its air and walks by its light has found the lost paradise.Collection: Truth
If any man seeks for greatness, let him forget greatness and ask for truth, and he will find both.Collection: Truth
Education is our only political safety. Outside of this ark all is deluge.Collection: Education
Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.Collection: Death
Every addition to true knowledge is an addition to human power.Collection: Knowledge
The teacher who is attempting to teach without inspiring the pupil with a desire to learn is hammering on cold iron.Collection: Teacher
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.Collection: Fear
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.Collection: Time
Evil and good are God's right hand and left.Collection: Good
Seek not greatness, but seek truth and you will find both.Collection: Truth
A human being is not attaining his full heights until he is educated.Collection: Education
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.Collection: Money
Education alone can conduct us to that enjoyment which is, at once, best in quality and infinite in quantity.Collection: Education
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.Collection: Education
Education then, beyond all other devices of human origin, is the great equalizer of the conditions of men, the balance-wheel of the social machinery.Collection: Education
To pity distress is but human; to relieve it is Godlike.Collection: Fear
A teacher who is attempting to teach without inspiring the pupil with a desire to learn is hammering on cold iron.Collection: Teacher
Doing nothing for others is the undoing of ourselves.
Habit is a cable; we weave a thread of it each day, and at last we cannot break it.
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 well to think well; it is divine to act well.
Let us not be content to wait and see what will happen, but give us the determination to make the right things happen.
Manners easily and rapidly mature into morals.
Jails and prisons are the complement of schools; so many less as you have of the latter, so many more must you have of the former.
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.
If evil is inevitable, how are the wicked accountable? Nay, why do we call men wicked at all? Evil is inevitable, but is also remediable.
Much that we call evil is really good in disguises; and we should not quarrel rashly with adversities not yet understood, nor overlook the mercies often bound up in them.
Doing nothing for others is the undoing of one's self. We must be purposely kind and generous, or we miss the best part of existence. The heart that goes out of itself, gets large and full of joy. This is the great secret of the inner life. We do ourselves the most good doing something for others.Collection: Heart
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.Collection: Thinking
The highest service we can perform for others is to help them help themselves.Collection: Leadership
If an idiot were to tell you the same story every day for a year, you would end by believing it.Collection: Believe
A house without books is like a room without windows.Collection: Life
There may be frugality which is not economy. A community, that withholds the means of education from its children, withholds the bread of life and starves their souls.Collection: Education
Education is a capital to the poor man, and an interest to the rich man.Collection: Education
There is nothing so costly as ignorance.Collection: Ignorance
We do ourselves the most good doing something for others.Collection: Undoing
Bodies are cleansed by water; the mind is purified by truth.Collection: Truth
It is more difficult, and it calls for higher energies of soul, to live a martyr than to die one.Collection: Soul
If ever there was a cause, if ever there can be a cause, worthy to be upheld by all of toil or sacrifice that the human heart can endure, it is the cause of Education.Collection: Heart
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.Collection: Love
Teachers teach because they care. Teaching young people is what they do best. It requires long hours, patience, and care.Collection: Thank You
Forts, arsenals, garrisons, armies, navies, are means of security and defence, which were invented in half-civilized times and in feudal or despotic countries; but schoolhouses are the republican line of fortifications, and if they are dismantled and dilapidated, ignorance and vice will pour in their legions through every breach.Collection: Country
Reproof is a medicine, like mercury or opium; if it be improperly administered, it will do harm instead of good.Collection: Medicine
The most formidable attribute of temptation is its increasing power, its accelerating ratio of velocity. Every act of repetition increases power, diminishes resistance. It is like the letting out of waters-where a drop can go, a river can go. Whoever yields to temptation, subjects himself to the law of falling bodies.Collection: Fall
We conceive of immortality as having a beginning, but no end; but we conceive of eternity as having neither beginning nor end. Hence it is proper to speak of eternity as the attribute of God, but of immortality as the attribute of man.Collection: Men
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.Collection: Change
Schoolhouses are the republican line of fortifications.Collection: Education
Knowledge is but an instrument, which the profligate and the flagitious may use as well as the brave and the just.Collection: Knowledge
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.Collection: Truth
As each generation comes into the world devoid of knowledge, its first duty is to obtain possession of the stores already amassed. It must overtake its predecessors before it can pass by them.Collection: Knowledge