Horace Mann Quotes - Page 3

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.

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.

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

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

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

It is well, when the wise and the learned discover new truths; but how much better to diffuse the truths already discovered, amongst the multitude! Every addition to true knowledge is an addition to human power; and while a philosopher is discovering one new truth, millions may be propagated amongst the people. Diffusion, then, rather than discovery, is the duty of our government.

Virtue is an angel, but she is a blind one, and must ask Knowledge to show her the pathway that leads to her goal.

Every event in this world is the effect of some precedent cause, and also the cause of some subsequent effect.

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

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

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.

Had I the power, I would scatter libraries over the whole land as the sower sows his wheatfield.

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 speak of color.

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.

We who are engaged in the sacred cause of education are entitled to look upon all parents as having given hostages to our cause.

Patient perseverance in well doing is infinitely harder than a sudden and impulsive self-sacrifice.

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

If you wish to write well, study the life about you,--life in the public streets.

The earth flourishes, or is overrun with noxious weeds and brambles, as we apply or withhold the cultivating hand. So fares it with the intellectual system of man.

An ignorant man is always able to say yes or no immediately to any proposition. To a wise man, comparatively few things can be propounded which do not require a response with qualifications, with discriminations, with proportion.

Above all, let the poor hang up the amulet of temperance in their homes.

Let but the public mind become once thoroughly corrupt, and all attempts to secure property, liberty or life, by mere force of laws written on parchment, will be as vain as to put up printed notices in an orchard to keep off the canker-worms.

Astronomy is one of the sublimest fields of human investigation. The mind that grasps its facts and principles receives something of the enlargement and grandeur belonging to the science itself. It is a quickener of devotion.

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.

When the panting and thirsting soul first drinks the delicious waters of truth, when the moral and intellectual tastes and desires first seize the fragrant fruits that flourish in the garden of knowledge, then does the child catch a glimpse and foretaste of heaven.