Harriet Martineau Quotes

78 Sourced Quotes

School is no place of education for any children whatever till their minds are well put in action. This is the work which has to be done at home, and which may be done in all homes where the mother is a sensible woman.

Harriet Martineau
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.

Harriet Martineau
There are always principles to be depended upon in this matter of taxation... Amidst the inconsistent, the bewildering representations offered, a certain number must be in accordance with true principles.

Harriet Martineau
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.

Harriet Martineau
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.

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
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
The clergy complain of the enormous spread of bold books, from the infidel tract to the latest handling of the miracle question.

Harriet Martineau
It is my deliberate opinion that the one essential requisite of human welfare in all ways is scientific knowledge of human nature.

Harriet Martineau
Women, like men, must be educated with a view to action, or their studies cannot be called education.

Harriet Martineau
A Sunday-school teacher asked a child… In what state were mankind left after the fall? — In the state of Vermont.

Harriet Martineau
I have suffered, like other writers, from indolence, irresolution, distaste to my work, absence of 'inspiration,' and all that: but I have also found that sitting down, however reluctantly, with the pen in my hand, I have never worked for one quarter of an hour without finding myself in full train.

Harriet Martineau
Self-denial is taught much better by inspiring the love of our neighbor, than by the prohibition of innocent comforts and pleasures. Spirituality is much better taught by making spiritual things the objects of supreme desire, than by commanding an ostentatious avoidance of the enjoyments of life.

Harriet Martineau
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.

Harriet Martineau
Milton must have travelled in Michigan before he wrote the garden parts of Paradise Lost.

Harriet Martineau
Scarcely anything that I observed in the United States caused me so much sorrow as the contemptuous estimate of the people entertained by those who were bowing the knee to be permitted to serve them.

Harriet Martineau
The intellect of women is confined by an unjustifiable restriction of... education.... As women have none of the objects in life for which an enlarged education is considered requisite, the education is not given.... The choice is to either be ill-educated, passive, and subservient, or well-educated, vigorous, and free only upon sufferance.

Harriet Martineau
Influence which is given on the side of money is usually against truth.

Harriet Martineau
The voice of a whole people goes up in the silent workings of an institution.

Harriet Martineau
Who is not apt, on occasion, to assign a multitude of reasons when one will do? This is a sure sign of weakness in argument.

Harriet Martineau
It is characteristic of genius to be hopeful and aspiring. It is characteristic of genius to break up the artificial arrangements of conventionalism, and to view mankind in true perspective, in their gradations of inherent rather than of adventitious worth. Genius is therefore essentially democratic, and has always been so.

Harriet Martineau
I romanced internally about early death till it was too late to die early.

Harriet Martineau
Leisure, some degree of it, is necessary to the health of every man's spirit.

Harriet Martineau
Wherever the appearance of a conventional aristocracy exists in America, it must arise from wealth, as it cannot from birth. An aristocracy of mere wealth is vulgar everywhere. In a republic, it is vulgar in the extreme.

Harriet Martineau
The imagination, once awakened, must and will work, and ought to work

Harriet Martineau
This large city lay in the landscape like an anthill in a meadow.

Harriet Martineau
It is the worst humiliation and grievance of the suffering, that they cause suffering.

Harriet Martineau
The highest condition of the religious sentiment is when it has attained repose; when the worshipper not only sees God every where, but sees nothing which is not full of God.

Harriet Martineau