Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
It is my deliberate opinion that the one essential requisite of human welfare in all ways is scientific knowledge of human nature.
Harriet Martineau
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
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
Literature
Agnostic
Knowledge
Deliberate
Nature
Welfare
Human
Scientific
Humans
Essential
Way
Essentials
Ways
Aquariums
Opinion
Requisite
More quotes by Harriet Martineau
The clergy complain of the enormous spread of bold books, from the infidel tract to the latest handling of the miracle question.
Harriet Martineau
Who is apt, on occasion, to assign a multitude of reasons when one will do? This is a sure sign of weakness in argument.
Harriet Martineau
it matters infinitely less what we do than what we are.
Harriet Martineau
Women, like men, must be educated with a view to action, or their studies cannot be called education.
Harriet Martineau
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
During the present interval between the feudal age and the coming time, when life and its occupations will be freely thrown open to women as to men, the condition of the female working classes is such that if its sufferings were but made known, emotions of horror and shame would tremble through the whole of society.
Harriet Martineau
[I] wish that the land-tax went a little more according to situation than it does. 'Tis really ridiculous, how one has to pay five times as much as another, without any reason that ever I heard tell.
Harriet Martineau
If there is any country on earth where the course of true love may be expected to run smooth, it is America.
Harriet Martineau
Everything but truth becomes loathed in a sick-room ... Let the nurse avow that the medicine is nauseous. Let the physician declare that the treatment will be painful. Let sister, or brother, or friend, tell me that I must never look to be well. When the time approaches that I am to die, let me be told that I am to die, and when.
Harriet Martineau
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
As new discoveries are causing all-penetrating physical lights so to abound as that, as has been said, we shall soon not know where in the world to get any darkness, so our new facilities for every sort of communication work to reduce privacy much within its former limits.
Harriet Martineau
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
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
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
Men who pass most comfortably through this world are those who possess good digestions and hard hearts.
Harriet Martineau
I certainly had no idea how little faith Christians have in their own faith till I saw how ill their courage and temper can stand any attack on it.
Harriet Martineau
Religion is a temper, not a pursuit.
Harriet Martineau
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
[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
. . . is it to be understood that the principles of the Declaration of Independence bear no relation to half of the human race?
Harriet Martineau