Harriet Martineau Quotes

78 Sourced Quotes

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.

Harriet Martineau
I wrote because I could not help it. There was something that I wanted to say, and I said it: that was all. The fame and the money and the usefulness might or might not follow. It was not by my endeavor if they did.

Harriet Martineau
The systematic abuse with which the newspapers of one side assail every candidate coming forward on the other, is the cause of many honorable men, who have a regard to their reputation, being deterred from entering public life; and of the people being thus deprived of some better servants than any they have.

Harriet Martineau
Authorship has never been with me a matter of choice. I have not done it for amusement, or for money, or for fame, or for any reason but because I could not help it.

Harriet Martineau
I wish that the land-tax went a little more according to situation than it does. 'Tis really ridiculous, how one has to pay five times as much as another, without any reason that ever I heard tell.

Harriet Martineau
I loved, as I still love, the most monotonous life possible.

Harriet Martineau
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.

Harriet Martineau
I have no sympathy for those who, under any pressure of circumstances, sacrifice their heart's-love for legal prostitution.

Harriet Martineau
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.

Harriet Martineau
The last thing it [government] ought to do is to ground its proceedings on the ignorance of the people, — to yield them that which they will hereafter despise the donors for granting them.

Harriet Martineau
The habit of dwelling on the past, has a narrowing as well as a debilitating influence. Behind us, there is a small, — an almost insignificant measure of time; before us, there is an eternity. It is the natural tendency of the mind to magnify the one, and to diminish the other.

Harriet Martineau
It matters infinitely less what we do than what we are.

Harriet Martineau
Happiness consists in the full employment of our faculties in some pursuit.

Harriet Martineau
Public opinion, — a tyrant, sitting in the dark, wrapt up in mystification and vague terrors of obscurity; deriving power no one knows from whom... — but irresistible in its power to quell thought, to repress action, to silence conviction.

Harriet Martineau
Even if their outward fortunes could be absolutely equalized, there would be, from individual constitution alone, an aristocracy and a democracy in every land. The fearful by nature would compose an aristocracy, the hopeful by nature a democracy, were all other causes of divergence done away.

Harriet Martineau
As new discoveries are causing all-penetrating physical lights so to abound as that, as has been said, we shall soon not know where in the world to get any darkness, so our new facilities for every sort of communication work to reduce privacy much within its former limits.

Harriet Martineau
Marriage... is still the imperfect institution it must remain while women continue to be ill-educated, passive, and subservient.

Harriet Martineau
If the national mind of America be judged of by its legislation, it is of a very high order... If the American nation be judged of by its literature, it may be pronounced to have no mind at all.

Harriet Martineau