Harriet Martineau Quotes

You 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.

Readers are plentiful; thinkers are rare.

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

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

[Americans] have realized many things for which the rest of the world is still struggling...[yet] the civilization and the morals of the Americans fall far below their own principles.

Freedom of opinion! Where is it? I see a press more mean and paltry and silly and disgraceful than any country ever knew, - if that be its standard, here it is. ... I speak of Miss Martineau, and all parties... shower down upon her a perfect cataract of abuse. "But what has she done? Surely she praised America enough!" - "Yes, but she told us of some of our faults, and Americans can't bear to be told of their faults.

I know what love is as I understand it — & if man or woman should feel ashamed of feeling such love — then there is nothing right, noble, faithful, truthful, unselfish on this earth.” -- responding to Harriet Martineau's criticism of VILLETTE.

You are to know that Miss Martineau’s mesmeric experience is only peculiar as being Harriet Martineau’s, otherwise it exhibits the mere commonplaces of the agency. You laugh, I see. I wish I could laugh too. I mean, I seriously wish that I could disbelieve in the reality of the power, which is in every way most repulsive to me....

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

Biography will never fail. Would that we were all equally secure of a higher matter, — our right of freedom of epistolary speech !

The weakest sufferers are precisely those who are least able to appropriate the future and its good things. If this be true of the weak, and if the strong find it irritating to be medicined with soft fictions, or presented with anything but sound truth, the popular method of consolation appears to be excluded altogether. If my own life were to be lived over again, I should, from the strength of this conviction, convert most of its words of intended consolation into a far more consolatory condolence. Never

The truth is, as all will declare who are subject to a frequently recurring pain, a familiar pain becomes more and more dreaded, instead of becoming lightly esteemed in proportion to its familiarity. The general sense of alarm which it probably occasioned when new, may have given way and disappeared before a knowledge of consequences, and a regular method of management or endurance; but the pain itself becomes more odious, more oppressive, more feared, in proportion to the accumulation of experience of weary hours, in proportion to the aggregate of painful associations which every visitation revives.

The reason may speak, and even through the lips, of hope and courage ; but the sensation of which I speak is peculiar ; so peculiarly connected with bodily agony, that I cannot but believe it felt wherever bodily agony is felt. It has nothing to do with the courage of the soul ; affords not the shadow of contradiction to patience, fortitude, religious trust, I mean simply that when extreme pain seizes on us, down go our spirits, fathoms deep ; and, though the soul may yet be submissive and even willing, the sickening question rises, — " How shall I bear this for five minutes? What will become of me?" And if the imagination stretches on to an hour, or hours, there is no word but despair which expresses the feeling. The bystanders can never fully understand this suffering ; no, though they may themselves have suffered to extremity.

Are we not growing sensibly more merciful, more wisely humane towards empirics themselves, when they cease to be our oracles ? Are we not learning, from their jumbled discoveries and failures, that empiricism itself is a social function,

But when my heart has sickened at the sight, and at the thought of so much gratuitous pain, it has grown strong again in the reflection that, if unnecessary, this misery is temporary, — that the true ground of mourning would be if the pain were not from causes which are remediable. Then I cannot but look forward to the time when the bad training of children, — the petulancies of neighbors — the errors of the ménage — the irksome superstitions, and the seductions of intemperance, shall all have been annihilated by the spread of intelligence, while the mirth at the minutest jokes — the proud plucking of nosegays — the little neighborly gifts, (less amusing hereafter, perhaps, in their taste) — the festal observances — the disinterested and refined acts of self-sacrifice and love, will remain as long as the human heart has mirth in it, or a humane complacency and self-respect,

Such women agree, as a matter of course, in the old notion,— suitable enough five centuries ago,— that the life of courtship should be as unlike as possible to married life. But I certainly think those much the wisest and the happiest, who look upon the whole affair as the solemn matter that it really is, and who desire to be treated, from the beginning, with the sincerity and seriousness which they will require after they are married.

What I have seen in this way leads me to imagine that my grandfather’s notion is a very common one,— that women have little occasion for money, and do not know how to manage it; and that their property is to be drawn upon to the very last, to meet the difficulties and supply the purposes of their brothers.

There were several occasions in the year when she could make sure beforehand of some hours to herself. Her Sundays were much occupied with the Sunday-school, and with intercourse with poor neighbours whom she could not meet on any other day : but Christmas-day, the day of the annual fair of Deerbrook, and two or three more, were her own. These were, however, so appropriated, long before, to some object, that they lost much of their character of holidays. Her true holidays were such as the afternoon of this day,— hours suddenly set free, little gifts of leisure to be spent according to the fancy of the moment. Let none pretend to understand the value of such whose lives are all leisure; who take up a book to pass the time; who saunter in gardens because there are no morning visits to make; who exaggerate the writing of a family letter into important business. Such have their own enjoyments: but they know nothing of the paroxysm of pleasure of a really hardworking person on hearing the door shut which excludes the business of life, and leaves the delight of free thoughts and hands.

The parish clerk had for some years, indeed ever since the death of the late stationer and dispenser of letters, carried on a flirtation with the widow, notwithstanding the rumours which were current as to the cause to which her late husband owed his death. It was believed that poor Harry Plumstead died of exhaustion from his wife’s voice;

Fran had from an unsuitably early age been attracted by the heroic death, the famous last words, the tragic farewell. Her parents had on their shelves a copy of Brewer's 'Dictionary of Phase and fable', a book which, as a teenager, she would morbidly browse for hours. One of her favourite sections was 'Dying Sayings', with its fine mix of the pious, the complacent, the apocryphal, the bathetic and the defiant. Artists had fared well: Beethoven was alleged to have said 'I shall hear in heaven'; the erotic painter Etty had declared 'Wonderful! Wonderful this death!'; and Keats had died bravely, generously comforting his poor friend Severn. Those about to be executed had clearly had time to prepare a fine last thought, and of these she favoured the romantic Walter Raleigh's, 'It matters little how the head lies, so the heart be right'. Harriet Martineau, who had suffered so much as a child from religion, as Fran had later discovered, had stoically remarked, 'I see no reason why the existence of Harriet Martineau should be perpetuated', an admirably composed sentiment which had caught the child Fran's attention long before she knew who Harriet Martineau was. But most of all she had liked the parting of Siward the Dane who had commended his men: 'Lift me up that I may die standing, not lying down like a cow'.

Only when we use every minute of our life will we know that we are eternal. —HARRIET MARTINEAU

True and consoling as it may be for him, and for those about him, to find thus that " trouble may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning," they have not fully learned the lessons of the sick room if they are not aware that, while the troubles of that night season are thus sure to pass away, its product of thoughts and experiences must endure, till the stars which looked down upon the scene have dissolved in their courses. The constellations formed in the human soul, out of the chaos of pain, must have a duration compared with which, those of the firmament are but as the sparkles showered over the sea by the rising sun. To one still in this chaos, — if he do but see the creative process advancing, — it can be no reasonable matter of complaint, that his course is laid the while through such a region ; and he will feel almost ashamed of even the most passing anxiety as to how soon he may be permitted to emerge.

In a sharp sickness of a few days or weeks, all good and kind people act and speak much alike; are busy and ingenious in hastening the recovery, and providing relief meantime. It is when death is not to be looked for, nor yet health, that the test is applied ; that, on either hand, the genius and the awkwardness of consolation present themselves, with a vast gradation between these extremes. It is easy and pleasant to be grateful for all, and to appreciate the love and pity which inspire them ; but it is impossible to relish all equally, or to give the same admiration to that which flows forth fully and freely, and that sympathy which is suppressed, restricted, or in any way changed before it reaches its object. O ! what a heavenly solace to the soul is free sympathy in its hour of need !

Far different was my emotion, when one said to me, with a face like the face of an angel, '' Why should we be bent upon your being better, and make up a bright prospect for you ? I see no brightness in it; and the time seems past for expecting you ever to be well." How my spirits rose in a moment at this recognition of the truth !

Rouse me from the depression of pain, wake me up from sleep for the better refreshment of this news, and I will rejoice ; but do not think to enhance your tidings by telling me that these things are my doing. The only effect of that is, to remind me how much better the service might have been done. Surely we both believe that all truth and goodness are destined to arise sooner or later among men. To be visited with new or good ideas is a blessing : to be appointed to communicate them is an honor : but these blessings and honors are a ground for personal humility, not complacency.

Nothing is more impossible to represent in words, even to one's self in meditative moments, than what it is to lie on the verge of life and watch, with nothing to do but to think, and learn from what we behold. Let any one recall what it is to feel suddenly, by personal experience, the full depth of meaning of some saying, always believed in, often repeated with sincerity, but never till now known. Every one has felt this, in regard to some one proverb, or divine scriptural clause, or word of some right royal philosopher or poet. Let any one then try to conceive of an extension of this realization through all that has ever been wisely said of man and human life, and he will be endeavoring to imagine our experience. Engrossing, thrilling, overpowering as the experience is, we have each to bear it alone ; for each of us is surrounded by the active and the busy, who have a different gift and a different office ; — and if not, it is one of those experiences which are incommunicable.

Meantime, what a work is done! Amidst the flat contradictions of fact, and oppositions of opinion, — amidst the passion which sets men's wits to work to conceive of and propose all imaginable motives and results, what an abundance of light is struck out ! From a crowd of falsehoods, what a revelation we have of the truth, which no one man, nor party of men, could reveal! — of the wants, wishes, and ideas of every class or coterie of society that can speak for itself, and of some that cannot !

We all know how the present action of our new civilization works to the impairing of Privacy. As new discoveries are causing all penetrating physical lights so to abound as that, as has been said, we shall soon not know where in the world to get any darkness, so our new facilities for every sort of communication, work to reduce privacy much within its former limits. There are some limits, however, which ought to be preserved with vigilance and care, as indispensable, not only to comfort, but to some of the finest virtues and graces of mind and life. It is to be hoped that the privacy of viva voce conversation will ever remain sacred : but it is known that that which ought to be as holy, that of epistolary correspondence, — (the private conversation of distant friends) is constantly and deliberately violated, where there are certain inducements to do so.

If I were asked whether there is any one idea more potential than any other over every sort of suffering, in a mode of life like ours, most hearers of the question would make haste to answer for me that there is such a variety of potential ideas, suited to such wide differences of mood, of mind and body, that it must be impossible to measure the strength of any one. Nevertheless, I should reply that there is one, to me more powerful at present than I can now conceive any single idea to have been in any former state of my mind. It is this ; that it matters infinitely less what we do than what we are.

John Ruskin did not go to school. Nor did Queen Victoria, nor John Stuart Mill, George Eliot or Harriet Martineau. It would be absurd to suggest that Disraeli, Dickens, Newman or Darwin, to name four very different figures, who attended various schools for short spells in their boyhood, owed very much to their schooling. Had they been born in a later generation, school would have loomed much larger in their psychological stories, if only because they would have spent so much longer there, and found themselves preparing for public examinations. It is hard not to feel that a strong ‘syllabus’, or a school ethos, might have cramped the style of all four and that in their different ways – Disraeli, comparatively rich, anarchically foppish, indiscriminately bookish; Darwin, considered a dunce, but clearly – as he excitedly learned to shoot, to fish and to bird-watch – beginning his revolutionary relationship with the natural world; Newman, imagining himself an angel; Dickens, escaping the ignominy of his circumstances through theatrical and comedic internalized role-play – they were lucky to have been born before the Age of Control. For the well-meaning educational reforms of the 1860s were the ultimate extension of those Benthamite exercises in control which had begun in the 1820s and 1830s. Having exercised their sway over the poor, the criminals, the agricultural and industrial classes, the civil service and – this was next – the military, the controllers had turned to the last free spirits left, the last potential anarchists: the children.

[Pain is] a mere disguise of blessings otherwise unattainable