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, A Few Thoughts for a Young 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.
HORACE MANN, A Few Thoughts for a Young Man
Injustice alone can shake down the pillars of the skies, and restore the reign of Chaos and Night.
HORACE MANN, A Few Thoughts for a Young Man
Under the sublime law of progress, the present outgrows the past. The great heart of humanity is heaving with the hopes of a brighter day. All the higher instincts of our nature prophesy its approach; and the best intellects of the race are struggling to turn that prophecy into fulfilment.
HORACE MANN, A Few Thoughts for a Young Man
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.
HORACE MANN, A Few Thoughts for a Young Man
Every nerve that can thrill with pleasure, can also agonize with pain.
HORACE MANN, A Few Thoughts for a Young Man
There is nothing derogatory in any employment which ministers to the well-being of the race. It is the spirit that is carried into an employment that elevates or degrades it.
HORACE MANN, A Few Thoughts for a Young Man
Wealth which breeds idleness ... is only a sort of human oyster-bed, where heirs and heiresses are planted, to spend a contemptible life of slothfulness in growing plump and succulent for the grave-worm's banquet.
HORACE MANN, A Few Thoughts for a Young Man
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.
HORACE MANN, A Few Thoughts for a Young Man
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 do of colors.
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. It has intrinsic and indestructible merits. It holds the welfare of mankind in its embrace, as the protecting arms of a mother hold her infant to her bosom. The very ignorance and selfishness which obstructs its path are the strongest arguments for its promotion, for it furnishes the only adequate means for their removal.
Those who exert the first influence upon the mind, have the greatest 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.
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. They are more, for they may save from that which is worse than death, as well as bless with that which is better than life.
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.
There is not a good work which the hand of man has ever undertaken, which his heart has ever conceived, which does not require a good education for its helper.
The education already given to the people creates the necessity of giving them more.
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.
When the panting and thirsting soul first drinks the delicious waters of truth, when the moral and intellectual tastes and desires first seize the fragrant fruits that flourish in the garden of knowledge, then does the child catch a glimpse and foretaste of heaven.
The living soul of man, once conscious of its power, cannot be quelled.
Whatever statesman or sage will effect reforms upon a gigantic or godlike scale must begin with the young.
Knowledge is but an instrument, which the profligate and the flagitious may use as well as the brave and the just.
Truths, no matter how momentous or enduring, are nothing to the individual until he appreciates them, and feels their force, and acknowledges their sovereignty. He cannot bow to their majesty until he sees their power. All the blind then, and all the ignorant--that is, all the children--must be educated up to the point of perceiving and admitting the truth, and acting according to its mandates.
Habit can overcome anything but instinct, and can greatly modify even that.
As an apple is not in any proper sense an apple until it is ripe, so a human being is not in any proper sense a human being until he is educated.
Common sense is better than genius, and hence its bestowment is more universal.
Some languages are musical in themselves, so that it is pleasant to hear any one read or converse in them, even though we do not understand a word that we hear.... Others are full of growling, snarling, hissing sounds, as though wild beasts and serpents had first taught the people to speak.
No combatants are so unequally matched as when one is shackled with error, while the other rejoices in the self-demonstrability of truth.
New constellations of truth are daily discovered in the firmament of knowledge, and new stars are daily shining forth in each constellation.
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.
As each generation comes into the world devoid of knowledge, its first duty is to obtain possession of the stores already amassed. It must overtake its predecessors before it can pass by them.
We are prone to seek immediate pleasure or good, however small, rather than remote pleasure or good, however vast.
Every event in this world is the effect of some precedent cause, and also the cause of some subsequent effect.
As all truth is from God, it necessarily follows that true science and true religion can never be at variance.
So multifarious are the different classes of truths, and so multitudinous the truths in each class, that it may be undoubtingly affirmed that no man has yet lived who could so much as name all the different classes and subdivisions of truths, and far less anyone who was acquainted with all the truths belonging to any one class. What wonderful extent, what amazing variety, what collective magnificence! And if such be the number of truths pertaining to this tiny ball of earth, how must it be in the incomprehensible immensity!
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.
In the acquisition of languages by direct study, where time can be afforded for the purpose, it is found that several languages, belonging to the same family--as the Latin, Italian, and Spanish, for instance--can be acquired together, almost as easily and rapidly, as either of them can be acquired separately, and with far less chance of their being lost from the memory of disuse. By finding the roots in the parent tongue, and by tracing the growth from these roots outward into different tongues, as it were genealogically, it is found that they descend and spread according to certain organic laws of modification and growth.
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