Horace Mann Quotes

125 Sourced Quotes

If you can express yourself so as to be perfectly understood in ten words, never use a dozen.

Horace Mann
The false man is more false to himself than to any one else. He may despoil others, but himself is the chief loser. The world's scorn he might sometimes forget, but the knowledge of his own perfidy is undying.

Horace Mann
Injustice alone can shake down the pillars of the skies, and restore the reign of Chaos and Night.

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
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
The living soul of man, once conscious of its power, cannot be quelled.

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
There is not a good work which the hand of man has ever undertaken, which his heart has ever conceived, which does not require a good education for its helper.

Horace Mann
After a child has arrived at the legal age for attending school,-whether he be the child of noble or of peasant,-the only two absolute grounds of exemption from attendance are sickness and death.

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
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