Top 60 Harriet Martineau Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “You had better live your best and act your best and think your best today; for today is the sure preparation for tomorrow and all the other tomorrows that follow.”

— Harriet Martineau

2. “Readers are plentiful; thinkers are rare.”

— Harriet Martineau

3. “I romanced internally about early death till it was too late to die early...”

— Harriet Martineau

4. “The imagination, once awakened, must and will work, and ought to work.”

— Harriet Martineau

5. “Women, like men, must be educated with a view to action, or their studies cannot be called education.”

— Harriet Martineau

6. “There have been few things in my life which have had a more genial effect on my mind than the possession of a piece of land.”

— Harriet Martineau

7. “Keep innocency, and take heed unto the thing that is right, for that shall bring a man peace at the last.”

— Harriet Martineau

8. “Moral excellence has no regard to classes and professions.”

— Harriet Martineau

9. “My business in life has been to think and learn, and to speak out with absolute freedom what I have thought and learned. The freedom is itself a positive and never-failing enjoyment to me, after the bondage of my early life.”

— Harriet Martineau

10. “Religion is a temper, not a pursuit.”

— Harriet Martineau

11. “The lesson taught us by these kindly commentators on my present experience is that dogmatic faith compels the best minds and hearts to narrowness and insolence.”

— Harriet Martineau

12. “I wrote because I could not help it. There was something that I wanted to say, and I said it: that was all. The fame and the money and the usefulness might or might not follow. It was not by my endeavor if they did.”

— Harriet Martineau

13. “It is hard to tell which is worse; the wide diffusion of things that are not true, or the suppression of things that are true.”

— Harriet Martineau

14. “The progression of emancipation of any class usually, if not always, takes place through the efforts of individuals of that class.”

— Harriet Martineau

15. “The sum and substance of female education in America, as in England, is training women to consider marriage as the sole object in life, and to pretend that they do not think so.”

— Harriet Martineau

16. “Religion is a temper, not a pursuit. It is the moral atmosphere in which human beings are to live and move. Men do not live to breathe: they breathe to live.”

— Harriet Martineau

17. “I have no sympathy for those who, under any pressure of circumstances, sacrifice their heart’s-love for legal prostitution.”

— Harriet Martineau

18. “If a test of civilization be sought, none can be so sure as the condition of that half of society over which the other half has power.”

— Harriet Martineau

19. “Laws and customs may be creative of vice; and should be therefore perpetually under process of observation and correction: but laws and customs cannot be creative of virtue: they may encourage and help to preserve it; but they cannot originate it.”

— Harriet Martineau

20. “A soul occupied with great ideas performs small duties.”

— Harriet Martineau

21. “I want to be a free rover on the breezy common of the universe.”

— Harriet Martineau

22. “Happiness consists in the full employment of our faculties in some pursuit.”

— Harriet Martineau

23. “My own feeling of concern arises from seeing how much moral injury and suffering is created by the superstitions of the Christian mythology.”

— Harriet Martineau

24. “I saw no poor men, except a few intemperate ones. I saw some very poor women; but God and man know that the time has not come for women to make their injuries even heard of.”

— Harriet Martineau

25. “What office is there which involves more responsibility, which requires more qualifications, and which ought, therefore, to be more honorable, than that of teaching?”

— Harriet Martineau

26. “It never enters the lady’s head that the wet-nurse’s baby probably dies.”

— Harriet Martineau

27. “The sick-room becomes the scene of intense convictions; and among these, none, it seems to me, is more distinct and powerful than that of the permanent nature of good, and the transient nature of evil.”

— Harriet Martineau

28. “The habit of dwelling on the past, has a narrowing as well as a debilitating influence. Behind us, there is a small, – an almost insignificant measure of time; before us, there is an eternity. It is the natural tendency of the mind to magnify the one, and to diminish the other...”

— Harriet Martineau

29. “It is my deliberate opinion that the one essential requisite of human welfare in all ways is scientific knowledge of human nature.”

— Harriet Martineau

30. “The voice of a whole people goes up in the silent workings of an institution.”

— Harriet Martineau

31. “The Penny Post will do more for the circulation of ideas, for the fostering of domestic affections, for the humanizing of the mass generally, than any other single measure that our national wit can devise.”

— Harriet Martineau

32. “Wherever the appearance of a conventional aristocracy exists in America, it must arise from wealth, as it cannot from birth. An aristocracy of mere wealth is vulgar everywhere. In a republic, it is vulgar in the extreme.”

— Harriet Martineau

33. “It is characteristic of genius to be hopeful and aspiring.”

— Harriet Martineau

34. “There is no death to those who perfectly love-only disappearance, which in time may be borne.”

— Harriet Martineau

35. “We do not believe in immortality because we can’t prove it, but we try to prove it because we cannot help believing it.”

— Harriet Martineau

36. “A Queen, or a Prime Minister’s secretary may be shot at in London, as we know; and probably there is no person eminent in literature or otherwise who has not been the object of some infirm brain or another. But in America the evil is sadly common.”

— Harriet Martineau

37. “Men who pass most comfortably through this world are those who possess good digestions and hard hearts.”

— Harriet Martineau

38. “Any one must see at a glance that if men and women marry those whom they do not love, they must love those whom they do not marry.”

— Harriet Martineau

39. “Authorship has never been with me a matter of choice. I have not done it for amusement, or for money, or for fame, or for any reason but because I could not help it.”

— Harriet Martineau

40. “Leisure, some degree of it, is necessary to the health of every man’s spirit.”

— Harriet Martineau

41. “Fidelity to conscience is inconsistent with retiring modesty. If it be so, let the modesty succumb. It can be only a false modesty which can be thus endangered.”

— Harriet Martineau

42. “I never did a right thing or abstained from a wrong one from any consideration of reward or punishment.”

— Harriet Martineau

43. “If there is any country on earth where the course of true love may be expected to run smooth, it is America.”

— Harriet Martineau

44. “School is no place of education for any children whatever till their minds are well put in action. This is the work which has to be done at home, and which may be done in all homes where the mother is a sensible woman.”

— Harriet Martineau

45. “Goodness and simplicity are indissolubly united.-The bad are the most sophisticated, all the world over, and the good the least.”

— Harriet Martineau

46. “Self-denial is taught much better by inspiring the love of our neighbor, than by the prohibition of innocent comforts and pleasures. Spirituality is much better taught by making spiritual things the objects of supreme desire, than by commanding an ostentatious avoidance of the enjoyments of life.”

— Harriet Martineau

47. “But is it not the fact that religion emanates from the nature, from the moral state of the individual? Is it not therefore true that unless the nature be completely exercised, the moral state harmonized, the religion cannot be healthy?”

— Harriet Martineau

48. “For my own part, I had rather suffer any inconvenience from having to work occasionally in chambers and kitchenthan witness the subservience in which the menial class is held in Europe.”

— Harriet Martineau

49. “I loved, as I still love, the most monotonous life possible...”

— Harriet Martineau

50. “Biography will never fail. Would that we were all equally secure of a higher matter, – our right of freedom of epistolary speech !”

— Harriet Martineau