Horace Mann

I have never heard anything about the resolutions of the apostles, but a good deal about their acts.

— Horace Mann

A house without books is like a room without windows. No man has a right to bring up his children without surrounding them with books, if he has the means to buy them. It is a wrong to his family. Children learn to read by being in the presence of books. The love of knowledge comes with reading and grows upon it. And the love of knowledge, in a young mind, is almost always a warrant against the inferior excitement of passions and vices.

— Horace Mann

It is well to think well. It is divine to act well.

— Horace Mann

To pity distress is but human; to relieve it is Godlike.

— Horace Mann

When a child can be brought to tears, and not from fear of punishment, but from repentance he needs no chastisement. When the tears begin to flow from the grief of their conduct you can be sure there is an angel nestling in their heart.

— 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.

— Horace Mann

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

— Horace Mann

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

— Horace Mann

Generosity during life is a very different thing from generosity in the hour of death; one proceeds from genuine liberality and benevolence, the other from pride or fear.

— Horace Mann

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

— Horace Mann

If an idiot were to tell you the same story every day for a year, you would end by believing it.

— Horace Mann

Ignorance breeds monsters to fill up the vacancies of the soul that are unoccupied by the verities of knowledge.

— Horace Mann

Manners easily and rapidly mature into morals.

— Horace Mann

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

— Horace Mann

Let the public mind become corrupt, and all efforts to secure property, liberty, or life by the force of laws written on paper will be as vain as putting up a sign in an apple orchard to exclude canker worms.

— Horace Mann

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

— Horace Mann

Unfaithfulness in the keeping of an appointment is an act of clear dishonesty. You may as well borrow a person's money as his time.

— 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

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

— Horace Mann

Teaching isn't one-tenth as effective as training.

— Horace Mann

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

Two golden hours somewhere between sunrise and sunset. Both are set with 60 diamond minutes. No reward is offered. They are gone forever.

— Horace Mann

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

— Horace Mann

Scientific truth is marvelous, but moral truth is divine and whoever breathes its air and walks by its light has found the lost paradise.

— Horace Mann

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

— Horace Mann

Avoid witicisms at the expense of others.

— Horace Mann

More will sometimes be demanded of you than is reasonable. Bear it meekly, and exhaust your time and strength in performing your duties, rather than in vindicating your rights. Be silent, even when you are misrepresented. Turn aside when opposed, rather than confront opposition with resistance. Bear and forbear, not defending yourselves, so much as trusting to your works to defend you. Yet, in counselling you thus, I would not be understood to be a total non-resistant;a perfectly passive, non-elastic sand-bag, in society; but I would not have you resist until the blow be aimed, not so much at you, as, through you, at the sacred cause of human improvement, in which you are engaged,a point at which forbearance would be allied to crime.

— 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.

— Horace Mann