Top 150 Horace Mann Quotes (2025 Update)

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

— Horace Mann

Featured in: Changing the World Quotes, Helping Others Quotes, Quotes About People, Teacher Quotes

2. “A teacher who is attempting to teach without inspiring the pupil with a desire to learn is hammering on cold iron.”

— Horace Mann

Featured in: Education Quotes, Learning Quotes, Encouraging Quotes for Students, Inspirational Quotes for Students, Teacher Appreciation Quotes

3. “A house without books is like a room without windows.”

— Horace Mann

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

— Horace Mann

5. “He who cannot resist temptation is not a man.”

— Horace Mann

6. “Doing nothing for others is the undoing of ourselves.”

— Horace Mann

Featured in: Volunteer Quotes

7. “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

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

— Horace Mann

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

— Horace Mann

10. “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.”

— Horace Mann

11. “Education then, beyond all other devices of human origin, is the great equalizer of the conditions of men, the balance-wheel of the social machinery.”

— Horace Mann

12. “It is well to think well; it is divine to act well.”

— Horace Mann

13. “Observation – activity of both eyes and ears.”

— Horace Mann

14. “Education is a capital to the poor man, and an interest to the rich man.”

— Horace Mann

15. “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.”

— Horace Mann

16. “Teachers teach because they care. Teaching young people is what they do best. It requires long hours, patience, and care.”

— Horace Mann

17. “We do ourselves the most good doing something for others.”

— Horace Mann

18. “A human being is not attaining his full heights until he is educated.”

— Horace Mann

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

— Horace Mann

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

— Horace Mann

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

— Horace Mann

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

22. “Bodies are cleansed by water; the mind is purified by truth.”

— Horace Mann

23. “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

24. “If an idiot were to tell you the same story every day for a year, you would end by believing it.”

— Horace Mann

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

25. “There is nothing so costly as ignorance.”

— Horace Mann

26. “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

27. “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

28. “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.”

— Horace Mann

29. “Enslave a man and you destroy his ambition, his enterprise, his capacity. In the constitution of human nature, the desire of bettering one’s condition is the mainspring of effort. The first touch of slavery snaps this spring.”

— Horace Mann

30. “Deeds survive the doers.”

— Horace Mann

31. “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

32. “You need not tell all the truth, unless to those who have a right to know it; but let all you tell be truth.”

— Horace Mann

33. “Habit can overcome anything but instinct, and can greatly modify even that.”

— Horace Mann

34. “Every event in this world is the effect of some precedent cause, and also the cause of some subsequent effect.”

— Horace Mann

35. “Virtue is an angel, but she is a blind one, and must ask Knowledge to show her the pathway that leads to her goal.”

— Horace Mann

36. “We must be purposely kind and generous or we miss the best part of life’s existence.”

— Horace Mann

37. “Patient perseverance in well doing is infinitely harder than a sudden and impulsive self-sacrifice.”

— Horace Mann

38. “Let the public mind become corrupt, and all efforts to secure property, liberty, or life by the force of laws written on paper will be as vain as putting up a sign in an apple orchard to exclude canker worms.”

— Horace Mann

39. “Ten men have failed from defect in morals, where one has failed from defect in intellect.”

— Horace Mann

40. “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

41. “Ignorance breeds monsters to fill up the vacancies of the soul that are unoccupied by the verities of knowledge.”

— Horace Mann

42. “Scientific truth is marvelous, but moral truth is divine and whoever breathes its air and walks by its light has found the lost paradise.”

— Horace Mann

43. “After a child has arrived at the legal age for attending school,-whether he be the child of noble or of peasant,-the only two absolute grounds of exemption from attendance are sickness and death.”

— Horace Mann

44. “Teaching isn’t one-tenth as effective as training.”

— Horace Mann

45. “An ignorant man is always able to say yes or no immediately to any proposition. To a wise man, comparatively few things can be propounded which do not require a response with qualifications, with discriminations, with proportion.”

— Horace Mann

46. “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.”

— Horace Mann

47. “In trying to teach children a great deal in a short time, they are treated not as though the race they were to run was for life, but simply a three-mile heat.”

— Horace Mann

48. “Every hand and every hour should be devoted to rescue the world from its insanity of guilt, and to assuage the pangs of human hearts with balm and anodyne. To pity distress is but human; to relieve it is Godlike.”

— Horace Mann

49. “Manners are the root, laws only the trunk and branches. Manners are the archetypes of laws. Manners are laws in their infancy; laws are manners fully grown, – or, manners are children, which, when they grow up, become laws.”

— Horace Mann

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

— Horace Mann