Top 100 Quotes & Sayings by Harriet Martineau

Explore popular quotes and sayings by an English novelist Harriet Martineau.

Last updated on December 21, 2024.

Harriet Martineau was an English social theorist often seen as the first female sociologist. She wrote from a sociological, holistic, religious and feminine angle, translated works by Auguste Comte, and, rarely for a woman writer at the time, earned enough to support herself. The young Princess Victoria enjoyed her work and invited her to her 1838 coronation. Martineau advised "a focus on all [society's] aspects, including key political, religious, and social institutions". She applied thorough analysis to women's status under men. The novelist Margaret Oliphant called her "a born lecturer and politician... less distinctively affected by her sex than perhaps any other, male or female, of her generation."

English - Novelist | June 12, 1802 - June 27, 1876

Source: Wikipedia

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

Religion is a temper, not a pursuit.

Harriet Martineau

We do not believe in immortality because we can prove it, but we try to prove it because we cannot help believing it.

Harriet Martineau

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

The sum and substance of female education in America, as in England, is training women to consider marriage as the sole object in life, and to pretend that they do not think so.

Harriet Martineau

The progression of emancipation of any class usually, if not always, takes place through the efforts of individuals of that class.

Harriet Martineau

You had better live your best and act your best and think your best today; for today is the sure preparation for tomorrow and all the other tomorrows that follow.

Harriet Martineau

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

A soul preoccupied with great ideas best performs small duties.

Harriet Martineau

I am sure that no traveler seeing things through author spectacles can see them as they are.

Harriet Martineau

Any one must see at a glance that if men and women marry those whom they do not love, they must love those whom they do not marry.

Harriet Martineau

A soul occupied with great ideas performs small duties.

Harriet Martineau

It is my deliberate opinion that the one essential requisite of human welfare in all ways is scientific knowledge of human nature.

Harriet Martineau

If a test of civilization be sought, none can be so sure as the condition of that half of society over which the other half has power.

Harriet Martineau

Men who pass most comfortably through this world are those who possess good digestions and hard hearts.

Harriet Martineau

What office is there which involves more responsibility, which requires more qualifications, and which ought, therefore, to be more honorable, than that of teaching?

Harriet Martineau

There have been few things in my life which have had a more genial effect on my mind than the possession of a piece of land.

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

For my own part, I had rather suffer any inconvenience from having to work occasionally in chambers and kitchen... than witness the subservience in which the menial class is held in Europe.

Harriet Martineau

I have no sympathy for those who, under any pressure of circumstances, sacrifice their heart's-love for legal prostitution.

Harriet Martineau

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

Harriet Martineau

Moral excellence has no regard to classes and professions.

Harriet Martineau

Keep innocency, and take heed unto the thing that is right, for that shall bring a man peace at the last.

Harriet Martineau

I romanced internally about early death till it was too late to die early.

Harriet Martineau

Readers are plentiful; thinkers are rare.

Harriet Martineau

I hope and believe my co-religionists understand and admit that I disclaim their theology in toto, and that by no twisting of language or darkening of its meanings can I be made to have any thing whatever in common with them about religious matters... they must take my word for it that there is nothing in common between their theology and my philosophy.

Harriet Martineau

It is characteristic of genius to be hopeful and aspiring.

Harriet Martineau

As the astronomer rejoices in new knowledge which compels him to give up the dignity of our globe as the centre, the pride, and even the final cause of the universe, so do those who have escaped from the Christian mythology enjoy their release from the superstition which fails to make them happy, fails to make them good, fails to make them wise, and has become as great an obstacle in the way of progress as the prior mythologies which it took the place of two thousand years ago.

Harriet Martineau

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

The last thing it [government] ought to do is to ground its proceedings on the ignorance of the people, - to yield them that which they will hereafter despise the donors for granting them.

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

It never enters the lady's head that the wet-nurse's baby probably dies.

Harriet Martineau

My own feeling of concern arises from seeing how much moral injury and suffering is created by the superstitions of the Christian mythology.

Harriet Martineau

All people interested in their work are liable to overrate their vocation. There may be makers of dolls' eyes who wonder how society would go on without them.

Harriet Martineau

it matters infinitely less what we do than what we are.

Harriet Martineau

The imagination, once awakened, must and will work, and ought to work

Harriet Martineau

influence which is given on the side of money is usually against truth.

Harriet Martineau

Women, like men, must be educated with a view to action, or their studies cannot be called education.

Harriet Martineau

I think that few people are aware how early it is right to respect the modesty of an infant.

Harriet Martineau

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.

Harriet Martineau

We are not responsible for our feelings, as we are for our principles and actions. ... Our care, then, should be to look to our principles, and to avoid all anxiety about our emotions. Their nature can never be wrong where our course of action is right, and for their degree we are not responsible.

Harriet Martineau

Happiness consists in the full employment of our faculties in some pursuit.

Harriet Martineau

Must love be ever treated with profaneness as a mere illusion? or with coarseness as a mere impulse? or with fear as a mere disease? or with shame as a mere weakness? or with levity as a mere accident? whereas it is a great mystery and a great necessity, lying at the foundation of human existence, morality, and happiness,--mysterious, universal, inevitable as death.

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

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

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

[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

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

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

All women should inform themselves of the condition of their sex and of their own position. It must necessarily follow that the noblest of them will, sooner or later, put forth a moral power which shall prostrate cant, and burst asunder the bonds (silken to some but cold iron to others) of feudal prejudice and usages. In the meantime is it to be understood that the principles of the Declaration of Independence bear no relation to half of the human race? If so, what is the ground of this limitation?

Harriet Martineau

Marriage ... is still the imperfect institution it must remain while women continue to be ill-educated, passive, and subservient.

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

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 certainly never believed, more or less, in the "essential doctrines" of Christianity, which represent God as the predestinator of men to sin and perdition, and Christ as their rescuer from that doom. I never was more or less behuiled by the trickery of language by which the perdition of man is made out to be justice, and his redemption to be mercy.

Harriet Martineau

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

[On being deaf:] We can never get beyond the necessity of keeping in full view the worst and the best that can be made of our lot. The worst is, either to sink under the trial, or to be made callous by it. The best is, to be as wise as is possible under a great disability, and as happy as is possible under a great privation.

Harriet Martineau

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

It is hard to tell which is worse; the wide diffusion of things that are not true, or the suppression of things that are true.

Harriet Martineau

His subject is the "Origin of Species," & not the origin of Organization; & it seems a needless mischief to have opened the latter speculation at all.

Harriet Martineau

The highest condition of the religious sentiment is when. . . the worshiper not only sees God everywhere, but sees nothing which is not full of God.

Harriet Martineau