We do ourselves the most good doing something for others.
Interpretation
Helping others contributes to our own well-being and personal growth.
Horace Mann's quote emphasizes the intrinsic value of altruism, suggesting that engaging in acts of kindness and support for others not only benefits them but also enriches our own lives. This idea reflects the interconnectedness of humanity, where the welfare of others is inherently tied to our own happiness and fulfillment.
In practice
In a speech about community service, one might say, 'As Horace Mann wisely pointed out, we do ourselves the most good doing something for others.'
Under the Providence of God, our means of education are the grand machinery by which the 'raw material' of human nature can be worked up into inventors and discoverers, into skilled artisans and scientific farmers, into scholars and jurists, into the founders of benevolent institutions, and the great expounders of ethical and theological science.
Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.
There may be frugality which is not economy. A community, that withholds the means of education from its children, withholds the bread of life and starves their souls.
Let us labor for that larger comprehension of truth, and that more thorough repudiation of error, which shall make the history of mankind a series of ascending developments.
Great knowledge is requisite to instruct those who have been well instructed, but still greater knowledge is requisite to instruct those who have been neglected.
Virtue is an angel, but she is a blind one, and must ask Knowledge to show her the pathway that leads to her goal.
I have an idea heaven will be both absolutely happy and absolutely dark, to protect us from the blaze of God.
I think our support for the EEC has been very half-hearted. You really cannot join any group of nations and spend all your time criticising it. The EEC is free Europe getting together. Had we had some vision like that after the first world war , we might never had the second ... my son does not have to go and fight as his father had to fight. Surely that is the most valuable thing of all, the reason for keeping Europe together.
Is it not a grotesque civilization which sends missionaries across the sea to save the souls of the heathen, and yet permits conditions at home that debauch the children at our very doors?
We all have appointments with the past.
We have been telling and hearing and reading war stories for millennia. Their endurance may lie in their impossibility; they can never be complete, for the tensions and the contradictions within them will never be eliminated or resolved. That challenge is essential to their power and their attraction. War stories matter.
We have to face the unpleasant as well as the affirmative side of the human story, including our own story as a nation, our own stories of our peoples. We have got to have the ugly facts in order to protect us from the official view of reality. Otherwise, we are squeezed empty and filled with what other people want us to think and feel and experience.
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