Harriet Martineau Quotes - Page 4

Quotes about:

Atheism Country Education Feelings Heart Illness Literature

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

Believe, Trying, Helping

4 Copy quote
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

Country, Republic, Purity

4 Copy quote
The last degree of honesty has always been, and is still considered incompatible with statesmanship. To hunger and thirst after righteousness has been naturally, as it were, supposed a disqualification for affairs.

Harriet Martineau

Honesty, Hunger And Thirst, Politics

Harriet Martineau (1837). “Society in America”, p.57

4 Copy quote
Day-thoughts feed nightly dreams;
And sorrow tracketh wrong,
As echo follows song.

Harriet Martineau

Dream, Song, Echoes

Harriet Martineau (1836). “Philosophical essays. Essays on the art of thinking. Sabbath musings. Moral essays. Parables. Poetry”, p.345

7 Copy quote
it is the worst humiliation and grievance of the suffering, that they cause suffering.

Harriet Martineau

Suffering, Causes, Illness

Harriet Martineau (1845). “Life in the Sick-room: Essays”, p.195

4 Copy quote
[On being deaf:] We must struggle for whatever may be had, without encroaching on the comfort of others.

Harriet Martineau

Struggle, Comfort, May

Harriet Martineau (1836). “Philosophical essays. Essays on the art of thinking. Sabbath musings. Moral essays. Parables. Poetry”, p.259

4 Copy quote
In the United States, as elsewhere, there are, and have always been, two parties in politics ... It is remarkable how nearly their positive statements of political doctrine agree, while they differ in almost every possible application of their common principles.

Harriet Martineau

Party, Two, Political

4 Copy quote
It is not quite true that there are no good letters written in America: among my own circle of correspondents there, there are ladies and gentlemen whose letters would stand a comparison with any for frankness, grace, and epistolary beauty of every kind. But I am not aware of any medium between this excellence and the boarding-school insignificance which characterizes the rest.

Harriet Martineau

School, Circles, America

Harriet Martineau (1837). “Society in America”, p.110

4 Copy quote
A Queen, or a Prime Minister's secretary may be shot at in London, as we know; and probably there is no person eminent in literature or otherwise who has not been the object of some infirm brain or another. But in America the evil is sadly common.

Harriet Martineau

Queens, America, Evil

Harriet Martineau (2015). “Harriet Martineau's Autobiography (Vol. I: Abridged, Annotated)”, p.317, BIG BYTE BOOKS

4 Copy quote
The instruction furnished is not good enough for the youth of such a country ... There is not even any systematic instruction given on political morals: an enormous deficiency in a republic.

Harriet Martineau

Education, Country, Political

Harriet Martineau (1837). “Society in America”, p.269

4 Copy quote
The lesson taught us by these kindly commentators on my present experience is that dogmatic faith compels the best minds and hearts to narrowness and insolence.

Harriet Martineau

Heart, Taught Us, Mind

Harriet Martineau, Linda H. Peterson (2007). “Autobiography”, Broadview Pr

4 Copy quote
if I believed that the choice lay between a sacrifice of the completest order of biography and that of the inviolability of private epistolary correspondence, I could not hesitate for a moment. I would keep the old and precious privacy,-the inestimable right of every one who has a friend and can write to him, - I would keep our written confidence from being made biographical material, as anxiously as I would keep our spoken conversation from being noted down for the good of society.

Harriet Martineau

Writing, Sacrifice, Order

Harriet Martineau (1845). “Life in the Sick-room: Essays”, p.92

4 Copy quote
When once experience taught me that I could work when I chose, and within a quarter of an hour of my determining to do so, I was relieved, in a great measure, from those embarrassments and depressions which I see afflicting many an author who waits for a mood instead of summoning it, and is the sport, instead of the master, of his own impressions and ideas.

Harriet Martineau

Sports, Ideas, Waiting

Harriet Martineau (2006). “Autobiography”, p.157, Broadview Press

4 Copy quote
[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

Land, Wish, Doe

Harriet Martineau (1834). “Illustrations of taxation”, p.50

4 Copy quote
There is no death to those who perfectly love-only disappearance, which in time may be borne.

Harriet Martineau

Grief, May, Disappearance

Harriet Martineau, Elisabeth Sanders Arbuckle (1983). “Harriet Martineau's Letters to Fanny Wedgwood”, p.30, Stanford University Press

4 Copy quote
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

Inspirational, Weakness, Argument

Harriet Martineau (1836). “Philosophical essays. Essays on the art of thinking. Sabbath musings. Moral essays. Parables. Poetry”, p.63

4 Copy quote
Even if their outward fortunes could be absolutely equalized, there would be, from individual constitution alone, an aristocracy and a democracy in every land. The fearful by nature would compose an aristocracy, the hopeful by nature a democracy, were all other causes of divergence done away.

Harriet Martineau

Hope, Fear, Government

4 Copy quote
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

Literature, Modesty, Fidelity

Harriet Martineau (1837). “Society in America”, p.112

7 Copy quote
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

Order, Law, America

Harriet Martineau (2004). “Harriet Martineau: Studies of America, 1831-1868”

4 Copy quote
It is characteristic of genius to be hopeful and aspiring. It is characteristic of genius to break up the artificial arrangements of conventionalism, and to view mankind in true perspective, in their gradations of inherent rather than of adventitious worth. Genius is therefore essentially democratic, and has always been so.

Harriet Martineau

Views, Perspective, Hopeful

Harriet Martineau (1837). “Society in America”, p.14

4 Copy quote
There are always principles to be depended upon in this matter of taxation ... Amidst the inconsistent, the bewildering representations offered, a certain number must be in accordance with true principles.

Harriet Martineau

Numbers, Principles, Taxation

Harriet Martineau (1834). “Illustrations of taxation”, p.116

4 Copy quote
Of tobacco and its consequences, I will say nothing but that the practice is at too bad a pass to leave hope that anything that could be said in books would work a cure. If the floors of boarding-houses, and the decks of steam-boats, and the carpets of the Capitol, do not sicken the Americans into a reform; if the warnings of physicians are of no avail, what remains to be said? I dismiss the nauseous subject.

Harriet Martineau

Book, Practice, House

Harriet Martineau (1837). “Society in America”, p.200

4 Copy quote

You May Also Like:

James Martineau

Karl Marx

Herbert Spencer

Charlotte Bronte

John Stuart Mill

C. Wright Mills

Harriet Martineau

Follow

Born: June 12, 1802
Died: June 27, 1876
Occupation: Writer
Cite this Page: Citation

Popular Topics