Harriet Martineau - Life Quotes

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

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
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 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
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
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