Quote

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

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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
Mind
Behind
Insignificant
Time
Influence
Tendency
Small
Tendencies
Almost
Measure
Narrowing
Natural
Eternity
Debilitating
Past
Perspective
Magnify
Wells
Habit
Dwelling
Well
Behinds
Diminish

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it is the worst humiliation and grievance of the suffering, that they cause suffering.
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Happiness consists in the full employment of our faculties in some pursuit.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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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.
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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.
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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.
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Who is apt, on occasion, to assign a multitude of reasons when one will do? This is a sure sign of weakness in argument.
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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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Men who pass most comfortably through this world are those who possess good digestions and hard hearts.
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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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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.
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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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Women, like men, must be educated with a view to action, or their studies cannot be called education.
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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.
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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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Moral excellence has no regard to classes and professions.
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I never did a right thing or abstained from a wrong one from any consideration of reward or punishment.
Harriet Martineau