Horace Mann Quotes

122 Sourced Quotes

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.

Horace Mann
A human being is not attaining his full heights until he is educated.

Horace Mann
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. I do not here mean that it so elevates the moral nature as to make men disdain and abhor the oppression of their fellow-men. This idea pertains to another of its attributes. But I mean that it gives each man the independence and the means by which he can resist the selfishness of other men. It does better than to disarm the poor of their hostility towards the rich: it prevents being poor.

Horace Mann
Every hand and every hour should be devoted to rescue the world from its insanity of guilt, and to assuage the pangs of human hearts with balm and anodyne. To pity distress is but human; to relieve it is Godlike.

Horace Mann
If any man seeks for greatness, let him forget greatness and ask for truth, and he will find both.

Horace Mann
A teacher who is attempting to teach without inspiring the pupil with a desire to learn is hammering cold iron.

Horace Mann
Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.

Horace Mann
Every addition to true knowledge is an addition to human power.

Horace Mann
Education is our only political safety. Outside of this ark all is deluge.

Horace Mann
Benevolence is a world of itself — a world which mankind, as yet, have hardly begun to explore. We have, as it were, only skirted along its coasts for a few leagues, without penetrating the recesses, or gathering the riches of its vast interior.

Horace Mann
Truths, no matter how momentous or enduring, are nothing to the individual until he appreciates them, and feels their force, and acknowledges their sovereignty. He cannot bow to their majesty until he sees their power. All the blind then, and all the ignorant--that is, all the children--must be educated up to the point of perceiving and admitting the truth, and acting according to its mandates.

Horace Mann
We are prone to seek immediate pleasure or good, however small, rather than remote pleasure or good, however vast.

Horace Mann
Doing nothing for others is the undoing of ourselves. We must purposely be kind and generous, or we miss the best part of existence. The heart which goes out of itself gets large and full. This is the great secret of the inner life. We do ourselves the most good doing something for others.

Horace Mann
Whether a young man shall reap pleasure or pain from winning the objects of his choice, depends, not only upon his wisdom or folly in selecting those objects, but upon the right or wrong methods by which he pursues them. Hence, a knowledge what to select and how to pursue, is as necessary to the highest happiness as virtue herself. Virtue is an angel, but she is a blind one, and must ask of Knowledge to show her the pathway that leads to her goal.

Horace Mann
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.

Horace Mann
Manners easily and rapidly mature into morals. As childhood advances to manhood, the transition from bad manners to bad morals is almost imperceptible. Vulgar and obscene forms of speech keep vulgar and obscene objects before the mind, engender impure images in the imagination, and make unlawful desires prurient. From the prevalent state of the mind, actions proceed, as water rises from a fountain.

Horace Mann
Habit is a cable; we weave a thread of it each day, and at last we cannot break it.

Horace Mann
No combatants are so unequally matched as when one is shackled with error, while the other rejoices in the self-demonstrability of truth.

Horace Mann
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.

Horace Mann
They who set an example make a highway. Others follow the example, because it is easier to travel on a highway than over untrodden grounds. As the mind becomes habituated to travel on the great thoroughfares which example makes, it seems even unnatural to leave them.

Horace Mann
The wealth which breeds idleness…is only a sort of human oyster-bed, where heirs and heiresses are planted, to spend a contemptible life of slothfulness in growing plump and succulent for the grave-worm's banquet.

Horace Mann
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.

Horace Mann
The education already given to the people creates the necessity of giving them more.

Horace Mann
Every nerve that can thrill with pleasure can also agonize with pain.

Horace Mann
Those who exert the first influence upon the mind have the greatest power.

Horace Mann
We put things in order — God does the rest. Lay an iron bar east and west, it is not magnetized. Lay it north and south and it is.

Horace Mann
There is nothing derogatory in any employment which ministers to the well-being of the race. It is the spirit that is carried into an employment that elevates or degrades it.

Horace Mann
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.

Horace Mann
Common sense is better than genius, and hence its bestowment is more universal.

Horace Mann
But let a man know that there are things to be known, of which he is ignorant, and it is so much carved out of his domain of universal knowledge.

Horace Mann