Horace Mann

Men are not accustomed to buy books unless they want them. If, on visiting the dwelling of a man of slender means, I find the reason why he has cheap carpets and very plain furniture to be that he may purchase books, he rises at once in my …

The object of punishment is, prevention from evil; it never can be made impulsive to good.

Every hand and every hour should be devoted to rescue the world from its insanity of guilt, and to assuage the pangs of human hearts with balm and anodyne. To pity distress is but human; to relieve it is Godlike.

To know how much there is that we do not know, is one of the most valuable parts of our attainments; for such knowledge becomes both a lesson of humility and a stimulus to exertion.

The most ignorant are the most conceited.

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

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

He who cannot resist temptation is not a man. He is wanting in the highest attributes of humanity.

The heart can put on charms which no beauty of known things, nor imagination of the unknown, can aspire to emulate. Virtue shines in native colors, purer and brighter than pearl, or diamond, or prism, can reflect.

The laws of nature are sublime, but there is a moral sublimity before which the highest intelligences must kneel and adore.

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.

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

I affirm, in words as true and literal as any that belong to geometry, that the man who withholds knowledge from a child not only works diabolical miracles for the destruction of good, but for the creation of evil also.

God is more to me than a grand and solitary Being, though refulgent with infinite perfections. Contemplated as enthroned in the midst of his works, his spiritual offspring in all the grand circuit of the worlds he has formed become a …

Doing nothing for others is the undoing of ourselves. We must purposely be kind and generous, or we miss the best part of existence. The heart which goes out of itself gets large and full. This is the great secret of the inner life. We do …

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

Observation — activity of both eyes and ears.

Genius may conceive but patient labor must consummate.

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.

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

it gives each man the independence and the means by which he can resist the selfishness of other men. It does better than to disarm the poor of their hostility towards the rich: it prevents being poor.

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.

From the prevalent state of the mind, actions proceed, as water rises from a fountain.

Manners easily and rapidly mature into morals.