Quote

I never did a right thing or abstained from a wrong one from any consideration of reward or punishment.

Harriet Martineau

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

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
Never
Reward
Consideration
Punishment
Rewards
Wrong
Right
Thing

More quotes by Harriet Martineau

Image
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.
Harriet Martineau
Image
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
Image
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
Image
I saw no poor men, except a few intemperate ones. I saw some very poor women but God and man know that the time has not come for women to make their injuries even heard of.
Harriet Martineau
Image
I loved, as I still love, the most monotonous life possible.
Harriet Martineau
Image
influence which is given on the side of money is usually against truth.
Harriet Martineau
Image
. . . is it to be understood that the principles of the Declaration of Independence bear no relation to half of the human race?
Harriet Martineau
Image
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
Image
Women, like men, must be educated with a view to action, or their studies cannot be called education.
Harriet Martineau
Image
If the national mind of America be judged of by its legislation, it is of a very high order ... If the American nation be judged of by its literature, it may be pronounced to have no mind at all.
Harriet Martineau
Image
Scarcely anything that I observed in the United States caused me so much sorrow as the contemptuous estimate of the people entertained by those who were bowing the knee to be permitted to serve them.
Harriet Martineau
Image
While feeling far less injured by toil than my friends took for granted I must be, I yet was always aware of the strong probability that my life would end as the lives of hard literary workers usually end, - in paralysis, with months or years of imbecility.
Harriet Martineau
Image
The progression of emancipation of any class usually, if not always, takes place through the efforts of individuals of that class.
Harriet Martineau
Image
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.
Harriet Martineau
Image
I wrote because I could not help it. There was something that I wanted to say, and I said it: that was all. The fame and the money and the usefulness might or might not follow. It was not by my endeavor if they did.
Harriet Martineau
Image
it matters infinitely less what we do than what we are.
Harriet Martineau
Image
Day-thoughts feed nightly dreams And sorrow tracketh wrong, As echo follows song.
Harriet Martineau
Image
[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
Image
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
Image
It never enters the lady's head that the wet-nurse's baby probably dies.
Harriet Martineau