Harriet Martineau Quotes
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A soul occupied with great ideas best performs small duties.
[Ideas]
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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.
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As for the just and noble idea, that nations, as well as individuals, are parts of one wondrous whole, it has hardly passed the lips or pen of any but religious men and poets. - It is the one great principle of the greatest religion which has ever nourished the morals of mankind.
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Ballads and popular songs are both the cause and effect of general morals; they are first formed, and then react. - In both points of view they are an index of public morals.
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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?
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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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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.
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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.
[Simplicity]
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Happiness consists in the full employment of our faculties in some pursuit.
[Happiness]
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I am sure that no traveler seeing things through author spectacles can see them as they are.
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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.
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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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It is characteristic of genius to be hopeful and aspiring.
[Hope]
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It is my deliberate opinion that the one essential requisite of human welfare in all ways is scientific knowledge of human nature.
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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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Men who pass most comfortably through this world are those who possess good digestions and hard hearts.
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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.
[Love]
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Religion is a temper, not a pursuit.
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The progression of emancipation of any class usually, if not always, takes place through the efforts of individuals of that class.
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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.
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