Teaching isn’t one-tenth as effective as training.
-Horace Mann
Deeds survive the doers.
-Horace Mann
Knowledge is a mimic creation.
-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
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.
-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
If there is anything for which I would go back to childhood, and live this weary life over again, it is for the burning, exalting, transporting thrill and ecstasy with which the young faculties hold their earliest communion with knowledge.
-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
Love not only occupies the higher lobes of the brain, but crowds out the lower to make room for its expansion.
-Horace Mann
Love–that divine fire which was made to light and warm the temple of home–sometimes burns at unholy altars.
-Horace Mann
Even the choicest literature should be taken as the condiment, and not as the sustenance of life. It should be neither the warp nor the woof of existence, but only the flowery edging upon its borders.
-Horace Mann
They who set an example make a highway. Others follow the example, because it is easier to travel on a highway than over untrodden grounds.
-Horace Mann
Habit can overcome anything but instinct, and can greatly modify even that.
-Horace Mann
The earth endured Christ’s ministry only three years;–not three weeks after his real character and purposes were generally known.
-Horace Mann
He who dethrones the idea of law, bids chaos welcome in its stead.
-Horace Mann
Avoid witticisms at the expense of others.
-Horace Mann
It would be more honourable to our distinguished ancestors to praise them in words less, but in deeds to imitate them more.
-Horace Mann
False conclusions which have been reasoned out are infinitely worse than blind impulse.
-Horace Mann
Observation – activity of both eyes and ears.
-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
Willmott has very tersely said that embellished truths are the illuminated alphabet of larger children.
-Horace Mann
You need not tell all the truth, unless to those who have a right to know it; but let all you tell be truth.
-Horace Mann
A teacher should, above all things, first induce a desire in the pupil for the acquisition he wishes to impart.
-Horace Mann
He who cannot resist temptation is not a man.
-Horace Mann
Injustice alone can shake down the pillars of the skies, and restore the reign of Chaos and Night.
-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
Had I the power, I would scatter libraries over the whole land, as the sower sows his wheat-field.
-Horace Mann
Finally, in regard to those who possess the largest shares in the stock of worldly goods, could there, in your opinion, be any police so vigilant and effetive, for the protections of all the rights of person, property and character, as such a sound and comprehensive education and training, as our system of Common Schools could be made to impart; and would not the payment of a sufficient tax to make such education and training universal, be the cheapest means of self-protection and insurance?
-Horace Mann
If temperance prevails, then education can prevail; if temperance fails, then education must fail.
-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.
-Horace Mann
I look upon Phrenology as the guide to philosophy and the handmaid of Christianity. Whoever disseminates true Phrenology is a public benefactor.
-Horace Mann
Want of occupation is the bane of both men and women, perhaps more especially of the latter.
-Horace Mann
In such a world as ours the idle man is not so much a biped as a bivalve; and the wealth which breeds idleness, of which the English peerage is an example, and of which we are beginning to abound in specimens in this country, 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-worms’ banquet.
-Horace Mann
When will society, like a mother, take care of all her children?
-Horace Mann
So, in the infinitely nobler battle in which you are engaged against error and wrong, if ever repulsed or stricken down, may you always be solaced and cheered by the exulting cry of triumph over some abuse in Church or State, some vice or folly in society, some false opinion or cruelty or guilt which you have overcome! And I beseech you to treasure up in your hearts these my parting words: Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.
-Horace Mann
Education is an organic necessity of a human being.
-Horace Mann
Biography, especially of the great and good, who have risen by their own exertions to eminence and usefulness, is an inspiring and ennobling study. Its direct tendency is to reproduce the excellence it records.
-Horace Mann
We do ourselves the most good doing something for others.
-Horace Mann
We must be purposely kind and generous or we miss the best part of life’s existence.
-Horace Mann
You may be liberal in your praise where praise is due: it costs nothing; it encourages much.
-Horace Mann
The object of punishment is prevention from evil; it can never be made impulsive to good.
-Horace Mann
There may be frugality which is not economy. A community, that withholds the means of education from its children, withholds the bread of life and starves their souls.
-Horace Mann
Under the Providence of God, our means of education are the grand machinery by which the ‘raw material’ of human nature can be worked up into inventors and discoverers, into skilled artisans and scientific farmers, into scholars and jurists, into the founders of benevolent institutions, and the great expounders of ethical and theological science.
-Horace Mann
It is well when the wise and the learned discover new truths; but how much better to diffuse the truths already discovered amongst the multitudes. Every addition to true knowledge is an addition to human power; and while a philosopher is discovering one new truth, millions of truths may be propagated amongst the people…. The whole land must be watered with the streams of knowledge.
-Horace Mann
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.
-Horace Mann
Time is a seedfield; in youth we sow it with causes; in after life we reap the harvest of effects.
-Horace Mann
Give me a house furnished with books rather than furniture! Both, if you can, but books at any rate!
-Horace Mann
Ignorance breeds monsters to fill up the vacancies of the soul that are unoccupied by the verities of knowledge.
-Horace Mann
We who are engaged in the sacred cause of education are entitled to look upon all parents as having given hostages to our cause.
-Horace Mann
But let a man know that there are things to be known, of which he is ignorant, and it is so much carved out of his domain of universal knowledge.
-Horace Mann
Without undervaluing any other human agency, it may be safely affirmed that the Common School, improved and energized, as it can easily be, may become the most effective and benignant of all the forces of civilization. Two reasons sustain this position. In the first place, there is a universality in its operation, which can be affirmed of no other institution whatever… And, in the second place, the materials upon which it operates are so pliant and ductile as to be susceptible of assuming a greater variety of forms than any other earthly work of the Creator.
-Horace Mann
He who cannot resist temptation is not a man. Whoever yields to temptation debases himself with a debasement from which he can never arise.
-Horace Mann
We go by the major vote, and if the majority are insane, the sane must go to the hospital.
-Horace Mann
There is nothing so costly as ignorance.
-Horace Mann
On entering this world our starting-point is ignorance. None, however, but idiots remain there.
-Horace Mann
Ignorance has been well represented under the similitude of a dungeon, where, though it is full of life, yet darkness and silence reign. But in society the bars and locks have been broken; the dungeon itself is demolished; the prisoners are out; they are in the midst of us. We have no security but to teach and renovate them.
-Horace Mann
Under the sublime law of progress, the present outgrows the past. The great heart of humanity is heaving with the hopes of a brighter day. All the higher instincts of our nature prophesy its approach; and the best intellects of the race are struggling to turn that prophecy into fulfilment.
-Horace Mann
A republican form of government, without intelligence in the people, must be, on a vast scale, what a mad-house, without superintendent or keepers, would be on a small one.
-Horace Mann
Affectation hides three times as many virtues as charity does sins.
-Horace Mann