Horace Mann Quotes - Page 5

You may as well borrow a person's money as his time.

The education already given to the people creates the necessity of giving them more.

The devil tempts men through their ambition, their cupidity, or their appetite, until he comes to the profane swearer, whom he clutches without any reward.

Great knowledge is requisite to instruct those who have been well instructed, but still greater knowledge is requisite to instruct those who have been neglected.

Temptation is a fearful word. It indicates the beginning of a possible series of infinite evils. It is the ringing of an alarm bell, whose melancholy sounds may reverberate through eternity. Like the sudden, sharp cry of "Fire!" under our windows by night, it should rouse us to instantaneous action, and brace every muscle to its highest tension.

Manners are the root, laws only the trunk and branches. Manners are the archetypes of laws. Manners are laws in their infancy; laws are manners fully grown,--or, manners are children, which, when they grow up, become laws.

Benevolence is a world of itself -- a world which mankind, as yet, have hardly begun to explore. We have, as it were, only skirted along its coasts for a few leagues, without penetrating the recesses, or gathering the riches of its vast interior.

Spurn not at seeming error, but dig below its surface for the truth; And beware of seeming truths that grow on the roots of error.

The most precious wine is produced upon the sides of volcanoes. Now bold and inspiring ideals are only born of a clear head that stands over a glowing heart.

Thank Heaven, the female heart is untenantable by atheism.

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.

Ten men have failed from defect in morals, where one has failed from defect in intellect.

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.

Education must bring the practice as nearly as possible to the theory. As the children now are, so will the sovereigns soon be.

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

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.

To know the machine one must know where each part belongs, and what its office is.

NO error is infused into the young mind, to lie there dormant, or to be reproduced only when the subject of thought or action recurs to which the error belongs; but the error becomes a model or archetype, after whose likeness the active powers of the mind create a thousand other errors.

Where a love of natural beauty has been cultivated, all nature becomes a stupendous gallery, as much superior in form and in coloring to the choicest collections of human art, as the heavens are broader and loftier than the Louvre or the Vatican.

In trying to teach children a great deal in a short time, they are treated not as though the race they were to run was for life, but simply a three-mile heat.

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.

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.

Whatever statesman or sage will effect reforms upon a gigantic or godlike scale must begin with the young.

You need not tell all the truth, unless to those who have a right to know it; but let all you tell be truth.

When you introduce into our schools a spirit of emulation, you have present the keenest spur admissible to the youthful intellect.