Quotes by Harriet Martineau

• The progression of emancipation of any class usually, if not always, takes place through the efforts of individuals of that class.
• 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.
• Religion is a temper, not a pursuit.
• 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.
• 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.
• We do not believe in immortality because we can prove it, but we try to prove it because we cannot help believing it.
• What office is there which involves more responsibility, which requires more qualifications, and which ought, therefore, to be more honorable, than that of teaching?
• 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.
• Men who pass most comfortably through this world are those who possess good digestions and hard hearts.
• For my own part, I had rather suffer any inconvenience from having to work occasionally in chambers and kitchen... than witness the subservience in which the menial class is held in Europe.
• I am sure that no traveler seeing things through author spectacles can see them as they are.
• It is my deliberate opinion that the one essential requisite of human welfare in all ways is scientific knowledge of human nature.
• 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.
• 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?
• 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.
• 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.
• A soul preoccupied with great ideas best performs small duties.
• If there is any country on earth where the course of true love may be expected to run smooth, it is America.
• A soul occupied with great ideas performs small duties.
• The more difficulties one has to encounter, within and without, the more significant and the higher dreams one’s dreams become.