Horace Mann Quotes

125 Sourced Quotes

As each generation comes into the world devoid of knowledge, its first duty is to obtain possession of the stores already amassed. It must overtake its predecessors before it can pass by them.

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

Horace Mann
Education alone can conduct us to that enjoyment which is, at once, best in quality and infinite in quantity.

Horace Mann
New constellations of truth are daily discovered in the firmament of knowledge, and new stars are daily shining forth in each constellation.

Horace Mann
He who shuts out truth, by the same act opens the door to all the error that supplies its place.

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

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

Horace Mann
The laws of nature are sublime, but there is a moral sublimity before which the highest intelligences must kneel and adore.

Horace Mann
Resolve to edge in a little reading every day, if it is but a single sentence. If you gain fifteen minutes a day, it will make itself felt at the end of the year.

Horace Mann
God draweth straight lines but we call them crooked.

Horace Mann
In vain do they talk of happiness who never subdued an impulse in obedience to a principle. He who never sacrificed a present to a future good, or a personal to a general one, can speak of happiness only as the blind do of colors.

Horace Mann
Man... has an inborn religious sentiment that whispers of a God to his inmost soul, as a shell taken from the deep yet echoes forever the ocean's roar.

Horace Mann
There is a deeper pleasure in following truth to the scaffold or the cross, than in joining the multitudinous retinue, and mingling our shouts with theirs, when victorious error celebrates its triumphs.

Horace Mann
One thing I certainly never was made for, and that is to put principles on and off at the dictation of a party, as a lackey changes his livery at his master's command.

Horace Mann
Knowledge is but an instrument, which the profligate and the flagitious may use as well as the brave and the just.

Horace Mann
It is far more difficult, I assure you, to live for the truth than to die for it.

Horace Mann
Physics is the Science of Matter; Metaphysics the Science of Mind — the Science of Being, apart from accidents and properties — Ontology.

Horace Mann
It is more difficult, and it calls for higher energies of soul, to live a martyr than to die one.

Horace Mann
Every school boy and school girl who has arrived at the age of reflection ought to know something about the history of the art of printing, papermaking, and so forth.

Horace Mann
The devil tempts men through their ambition, their cupidity, or their appetite, until he comes to the profane swearer, whom he clutches without any reward.

Horace Mann
Dynasties and governments used to be attacked and defended by arms; now the attack and the defence are mainly carried on by types.

Horace Mann
As all truth is from God, it necessarily follows that true science and true religion can never be at variance.

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
Whatever statesman or sage will effect reforms upon a gigantic or godlike scale must begin with the young.

Horace Mann
Enslave a man and you destroy his ambition, his enterprise, his capacity. In the constitution of human nature, the desire of bettering one's condition is the mainspring of effort. The first touch of slavery snaps this spring.

Horace Mann