Harriet Martineau Quotes

78 Sourced Quotes

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.

Harriet Martineau
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.

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.

Harriet Martineau
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.

Harriet Martineau
Religion is a temper, not a pursuit. It is the moral atmosphere in which human beings are to live and move. Men do not live to breathe: they breathe to live.

Harriet Martineau
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.

Harriet Martineau
What office is there which involves more responsibility, which requires more qualifications, and which ought, therefore, to be more honourable, than that of teaching?

Harriet Martineau
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.

Harriet Martineau
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?

Harriet Martineau
If there is any country on earth where the course of true love may be expected to run smooth, it is America.

Harriet Martineau
Is it to be understood that the principles of the Declaration of Independence bear no relation to half of the human race?

Harriet Martineau
Goodness and simplicity are indissolubly united.-The bad are the most sophisticated, all the world over, and the good the least.

Harriet Martineau
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.

Harriet Martineau
These people are a specimen of how people talk, the wide world over... You see how they argue upon the vast interests of vast bodies from the temporary aspect of their own little affairs.

Harriet Martineau
All people interested in their work are liable to overrate their vocation. There may be makers of dolls' eyes who wonder how society would go on without them.

Harriet Martineau
This noble word [women], spirit-stirring as it passes over English ears, is in America banished, and 'ladies' and 'females' substituted: the one to English taste mawkish and vulgar; the other indistinctive and gross.

Harriet Martineau
During the present interval between the feudal age and the coming time, when life and its occupations will be freely thrown open to women as to men, the condition of the female working classes is such that if its sufferings were but made known, emotions of horror and shame would tremble through the whole of society.

Harriet Martineau
I certainly never believed, more or less, in the "essential doctrines" of Christianity, which represent God as the predestinator of men to sin and perdition, and Christ as their rescuer from that doom. I never was more or less behuiled by the trickery of language by which the perdition of man is made out to be justice, and his redemption to be mercy.

Harriet Martineau
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.

Harriet Martineau
Wealth and opinion were practically worshipped before Washington opened his eyes on the sun which was to light him to his deeds; and the worship of Opinion is, at this day, the established religion of the United States.

Harriet Martineau
In the present state of the religious world, Secularism ought to flourish. What an amount of sin and woe might and would then be extinguished.

Harriet Martineau
I would not exchange my freedom from old superstition, if I were to be burned at the stake next month, for all the peace and quiet of orthodoxy, if I must take the orthodoxy with peace and quiet.

Harriet Martineau
While feeling far less injured by toil than my friends took for granted I must be, I yet was always aware of the strong probability that my life would end as the lives of hard literary workers usually end, — in paralysis, with months or years of imbecility.

Harriet Martineau
There is no death to those who perfectly love, — only disappearance, which in time may be borne.

Harriet Martineau
The sick-room becomes the scene of intense convictions; and among these, none, it seems to me, is more distinct and powerful than that of the permanent nature of good, and the transient nature of evil.

Harriet Martineau
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.

Harriet Martineau
I think that few people are aware how early it is right to respect the modesty of an infant.

Harriet Martineau
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.

Harriet Martineau
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.

Harriet Martineau
Day-thoughts feed nightly dreams;
And sorrow tracketh wrong,
As echo follows song.

Harriet Martineau