Horace Mann Quotes

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.

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.

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

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.

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

No matter how seemingly unconnected with human affairs or remote from human interests a newly-discovered truth may appear to be, time and genius will some day make it minister to human welfare. When Dr. Franklin was once sceptically asked what was the use of some recondite and far-off truth which had just been brought to light, "What," said he, "is the use of babies?"

So much, then, my friends, is done, in the common and established course of nature, for the welfare of our children. Nature supplies a perennial force, unexhausted, inexhaustible, re-appearing whenever and wherever the parental relation exists. We, then, who are engaged in the sacred cause of education, are entitled to look upon all parents as having given hostages to our cause; and, just as soon as we can make them see the true relation in which they and their children stand to this cause, they will become advocates for its advancement, more ardent and devoted than ourselves.

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

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

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.

When a child can be brought to tears, not from fear of punishment, but from repentance for his offence, he needs no chastisement. When the tears begin to flow from grief at one's own conduct, be sure there is an angel nestling in the bosom.

Education...beyond all other devices of human origin, is a great equalizer of conditions of men — the balance wheel of the social machinery...It does better than to disarm the poor of their hostility toward the rich; it prevents being poor.

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.

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.

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.