Quotes from Horace Mann

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

Children learn to read by being in the presence of books.

Books are the windows through which the soul looks out. 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. It is a wrong to his family. He cheats them! Children learn to read by being in the presence of books. The love of knowledge comes with reading and grows upon it.

Seek not greatness, but seek truth and you will find both.

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.

The most important ingredient in the formula of success is knowing how to get along with other people.

The most ignorant are the most conceited.

Education is our only political safety. Outside of this ark, all is deluge.

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.

The best teachers teach from the heart, not the book.

In vain do they talk of happiness who never subdued an impulse in obedience to a principle. He who never sacrificed a present to a future good, or a personal to a general one, can speak of happiness only as the blind speak of color.

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.

all the members of society have a direct interest in the manners of each of its individuals, because each one is a radiating point, the center of a circle which he fills with pleasure or annoyance, not only for those who voluntarily enter it but for those, who, in the promiscuous movements of society, are caught within its circumference.

Affectation hides three times as many virtues as charity does sins.

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

It is well to think well; it is divine to act well.

The teacher who is attempting to teach without inspiring the pupil with a desire to learn is hammering on cold iron.

If temperance prevails, then education can prevail; if temperance fails, then education must fail.

We who are engaged in the sacred cause of education are entitled to look upon all parents as having given hostages to our cause.

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

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

If ever there was a cause, if ever there can be a cause, worthy to be upheld by all of toil or sacrifice that the human heart can endure, it is the cause of Education.

Let us not be content to wait and see what will happen, but give us the determination to make the right things happen.

To pity distress is but human; to relieve it is Godlike.