Quotes from Horace Mann

He who cannot resist temptation is not a man.

He who cannot resist temptation is not a man. Whoever yields to temptation debases himself with a debasement from which he can never arise.

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.

The living soul of man, once conscious of its power, cannot be quelled.

Superiority to circumstances is one of the most prominent characteristics of great men.

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.

Man is improvable. Some people think he is only a machine, and that the only difference between a man and a mill is, that one is carried by blood and the other by water.

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

I look upon Phrenology as the guide to philosophy and the handmaid of Christianity. Whoever disseminates true Phrenology is a public benefactor.

Habit is a cable; we weave a thread of it each day, and at last we cannot break it.

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

Man ... has an inborn religious sentiment that whispers of a God to his inmost soul, as a shell taken from the deep yet echoes forever the ocean's roar.

God draweth straight lines but we call them crooked.

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.

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.

The highest service we can perform for others is to help them help themselves.

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.

Above all, let the poor hang up the amulet of temperance in their homes.

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

Jails and prisons are the complement of schools; so many less as you have of the latter, so many more must you have of the former.

Doing nothing for others is the undoing of ourselves.

Injustice alone can shake down the pillars of the skies, and restore the reign of Chaos and Night.

Those who exert the first influence upon the mind have the greatest power.

Had I the power, I would scatter libraries over the whole land as the sower sows his wheatfield.