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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

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Harriet Martineau
Age: 74 †
Born: 1802
Born: June 12
Died: 1876
Died: June 27
Economist
Essayist
Feminist
Historian
Journalist
Linguist
Novelist
Philosopher
Sociologist
Suffragist
Translator
Writer
Norwich
Norfolk
Help
Helping
Cannot
Trying
Believe
Immortality
Believing
Prove

More quotes by Harriet Martineau

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Women, like men, must be educated with a view to action, or their studies cannot be called education.
Harriet Martineau
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It never enters the lady's head that the wet-nurse's baby probably dies.
Harriet Martineau
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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.
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It is characteristic of genius to be hopeful and aspiring.
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Moral excellence has no regard to classes and professions.
Harriet Martineau
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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
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the systematic abuse with which the newspapers of one side assail every candidate coming forward on the other, is the cause of many honorable men, who have a regard to their reputation, being deterred from entering public life and of the people being thus deprived of some better servants than any they have.
Harriet Martineau
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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
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Happiness consists in the full employment of our faculties in some pursuit.
Harriet Martineau
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This noble word [women], spirit-stirring as it passes over English ears, is in America banished, and 'ladies' and 'females' substituted: the one to English taste mawkish and vulgar the other indistinctive and gross.
Harriet Martineau
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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
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I would not exchange my freedom from old superstition, if I were to be burned at the stake next month, for all the peace and quiet of orthodoxy, if I must take the orthodoxy with peace and quiet.
Harriet Martineau
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Leisure, some degree of it, is necessary to the health of every man's spirit.
Harriet Martineau
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it is a testament to the strength and purity of the democratic sentiment in the country, that the republic has not been overthrown by its newspapers.
Harriet Martineau
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Goodness and simplicity are indissolubly united.-The bad are the most sophisticated, all the world over, and the good the least.
Harriet Martineau
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I have suffered, like other writers, from indolence, irresolution, distaste to my work, absence of 'inspiration,' and all that: but I have also found that sitting down, however reluctantly, with the pen in my hand, I have never worked for one quarter of an hour without finding myself in full train.
Harriet Martineau
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[On being deaf:] How much less pain there is in calmly estimating the enjoyments from which we must separate ourselves, of bravely saying, for once and for ever, 'Let them go,' than in feeling them waste and dwindle, till their very shadows escape from our grasp!
Harriet Martineau
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If there is any country on earth where the course of true love may be expected to run smooth, it is America.
Harriet Martineau
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There is no theory of a God, of an author of Nature, of an origin of the Universe, which is not utterly repugnant to my faculties. . .
Harriet Martineau
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The progression of emancipation of any class usually, if not always, takes place through the efforts of individuals of that class.
Harriet Martineau