Manners easily and rapidly mature into morals.
– Horace Mann
Be ashamed to die before you have won some victory for humanity.
– Horace Mann
Ignorance breeds monsters to fill up the vacancies of the soul that are unoccupied by the
verities of knowledge.
– Horace Mann
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.
– Horace Mann
Doing nothing for others is the undoing of ourselves.
– Horace Mann
A house without books is like a room without windows.
– Horace Mann
The laws of nature are sublime, but there is a moral sublimity before which the highest
intelligences must kneel and adore.
– Horace Mann
A teacher who is attempting to teach without inspiring the pupil with a desire to learn is
hammering on cold iron.
– Horace Mann
Do not think of knocking out another person’s brains because he differs in opinion from you. It
would be as rational to knock yourself on the head because you differ from yourself ten years
ago.
– Horace Mann
It is well to think well. It is divine to act well.
– Horace Mann
Education alone can conduct us to that enjoyment which is, at once, best in quality and
infinite in quantity.
– 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
If any man seeks for greatness, let him forget greatness and ask for truth, and he will find
both.
– Horace Mann
We do ourselves the most good doing something for others.
– Horace Mann
Scientific truth is marvellous, but moral truth is divine; and whoever breathes its air and walks
by its light, has found the lost paradise. For him, a new heaven and a new earth have already
been created.
– Horace Mann
Education is our only political safety. Outside of this ark all is deluge.
– Horace Mann
A human being is not attaining his full heights until he is educated.
– Horace Mann
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.
– Horace Mann
Books are not made for furniture but there is nothing else that so beautifully furnishes a house.
– Horace Mann
The false man is more false to himself than to any one else. He may despoil others, but
himself is the chief loser. The world’s scorn he might sometimes forget, but the knowledge of
his own perfidy is undying.
– Horace Mann
Education, then, beyond all other devices of human origin, is the great equalizer of the
conditions of men.
– Horace Mann
I have never heard anything about the resolutions of the apostles, but a good deal about their
acts.
– Horace Mann
Every addition to true knowledge is an addition to human power.
– Horace Mann
Knowledge can be acquired, diffused, perpetuated. An invisible, inaudible, intangible thought
in the silent chambers of the mind, breaks away from its confinement, becomes imbodied in a
sign, is multiplied by myriads, traverses the earth, and goes resounding down to the latest
posterity.
– Horace Mann
Let us labor for that larger and larger comprehension of truth, that more and more thorough
repudiation of error, which shall make the history of mankind a series of ascending
developments.
– Horace Mann
If you can express yourself so as to be perfectly understood in ten words, never use a dozen.
– 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
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.
– Horace Mann
We are prone to seek immediate pleasure or good, however small, rather than remote pleasure
or good, however vast.
– Horace Mann
Time is a seedfield: In youth we sow it with causes; in after life we reap the harvest of
effects.
– Horace Mann
Habit is a cable. We weave a thread of it every day, and at last we cannot break it.
– Horace Mann
As all truth is from God, it necessarily follows that true science and true religion can never be
at variance.
– Horace Mann
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.
– Horace Mann
Teachers teach because they care. Teaching young people is what they do best. It requires
long hours, patience, and care.
– Horace Mann
The most ignorant are the most conceited.
– Horace Mann
It is more difficult, and it calls for higher energies of soul, to live a martyr than to die one.
– Horace Mann
A man of worth is like gold – never out of fashion.
– Horace Mann
Good books are to the young mind what the warming sun and the refreshing rain of spring are
to the seeds which have lain dormant in the frosts of winter.
– 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
Those who exert the first influence upon the mind, have the greatest power.
– Horace Mann
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.
– Horace Mann
Habit can overcome anything but instinct, and can greatly modify even that.
– 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
History, with scarcely an exception, ought to be rewritten.
– Horace Mann
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.
– Horace Mann
In the march of universal improvement, education must lead the van.
– Horace Mann
The living soul of man, once conscious of its power, cannot be quelled.
– Horace Mann
Observation – activity of both eyes and ears.
– Horace Mann