Top 100 Herbert Spencer Quotes
#1. I had a great dislike to the annoyances entailed by baggage; and it was always with some feeling of elation that I cut myself free from everything but what I could carry about me. Like children, portmanteaus and trunks are hostages to fortune.
Herbert Spencer
#2. Increasing power of a growing administrative organization is accompanied by decreasing power of the rest of the society to resist its further growth and control.
Herbert Spencer
#3. To play billiards well is the sign of a misspent youth.
Herbert Spencer
#4. In the supremacy of self-control consists one of the perfections of the ideal man.
Herbert Spencer
#5. It is the function of parents to see that their children habitually experience the true consequences of their conduct.
Herbert Spencer
#6. Of all the knowledge, that most worth having is knowledge about health! The first requisite of a good life is to be a healthy person.
Herbert Spencer
#7. No place, no company, no age, no person is temptation-free; let no man boast that he was never tempted, let him not be high-minded, but fear, for he may be surprised in that very instant wherein he boasteth that he was never tempted at all.
Herbert Spencer
#8. There is a principle which is a bar against all information, which cannot fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance-that principle is contempt prior to investigation.
Herbert Spencer
#9. The greatest of all infidelities is the fear that the truth will be bad.
Herbert Spencer
#10. Morality knows nothing of geographical boundaries, or distinctions of race.
Herbert Spencer
#11. Every pleasure raises the tide of life; every pain lowers the tide of life.
Herbert Spencer
#12. The question of questions for the politicians should ever be-What type of social structure am I tending to produce? But this is a question he never entertains.
Herbert Spencer
#13. With a higher moral nature will come a restriction on the multiplication of the inferior.
Herbert Spencer
#14. Marriage: a ceremony in which rings are put on the finger of the lady and through the nose of the gentleman.
Herbert Spencer
#15. The forces which are working out the great scheme of perfect happiness, taking no account of incidental suffering, exterminate such sections of mankind as stand in their way, with the same sternness that they exterminate beasts of prey and herds of useless ruminants.
Herbert Spencer
#16. Objects we ardently pursue bring little happiness when gained; most of our pleasures come from unexpected sources.
Herbert Spencer
#17. Lusts are like agues; the fit is not always on, and yet the man is not rid of his disease; and some men's lusts, like some agues, have not such quick returns as others.
Herbert Spencer
#18. Education has for its object to develop the child into a man of well proportioned and harmonious nature-this is alike the aim of parent and teacher.
Herbert Spencer
#19. No man is equal to his book. All the best products of his mental activity go into his book, where they come separated from the mass of inferior products with which they are mingled in his daily talk.
Herbert Spencer
#20. Never educate a child to be a gentleman or lady alone, but to be a man, a woman.
Herbert Spencer
#21. If men use their liberty in such a way as to surrender their liberty, are they thereafter any the less slaves? If people by a plebiscite elect a man despot over them, do they remain free because the despotism was of their own making?
Herbert Spencer
#22. Truth generally lies in the coordination of antagonistic opinions.
Herbert Spencer
#24. The great aim of education is not knowledge but action.
Herbert Spencer
#26. Music must take rank as the highest of the fine arts - as the one which, more than any other, ministers to the human spirit.
Herbert Spencer
#27. The primary use of knowledge is for such guidance of conduct under all circumstances as shall make living complete. All other uses of knowledge are secondary.
Herbert Spencer
#28. When men hire themselves out to shoot other men to order, asking nothing about the justice of their cause, I don't care if they are shot themselves.
Herbert Spencer
#29. Absolute morality is the regulation of conduct in such a way that pain shall not be inflicted.
Herbert Spencer
#30. Volumes might be written upon the impiety of the pious.
Herbert Spencer
#31. The child takes most of his nature of the mother, besides speech, manners, and inclination.
Herbert Spencer
#32. Progress, therefore, is not an accident, but a necessity ... It is a part of nature.
Herbert Spencer
#33. Every man is free to do that which he wills, provided he infringes not the equal freedom of any other man.
Herbert Spencer
#34. Every man may claim the fullest liberty to exercise his faculties compatible with the possession of like liberties by every other man.
Herbert Spencer
#35. What a cage is to the wild beast, law is to the selfish man.
Herbert Spencer
#36. In literary art, as in the art of the architect, the painter, the musician, signs that the artist is thinking of his own achievement more than of his subject always offend me.
Herbert Spencer
#37. The poverty of the incapable, the distresses that come upon the imprudent, the starvation of the idle, and those shoulderings aside of the weak by the strong, which leave so many "in shallows and in miseries," are the decrees of a large, far-seeing benevolence.
Herbert Spencer
#38. The saying that beauty is but skin deep, is but a skin-deep saying.
Herbert Spencer
#39. The freest form of government is only the least objectionable form. The rule of the many by the few we call tyranny: the rule of the few by the many is tyranny also; only of a less intense kind.
Herbert Spencer
#42. The pursuit of individual happiness within those limits prescribed by social conditions, is the first requisite to the attainment of the greatest general happiness.
Herbert Spencer
#43. We too often forget that not only is there 'a soul of goodness in things evil,' but very generally also, a soul of truth in things erroneous.
Herbert Spencer
#44. A living thing is distinguished from a dead thing by the multiplicity of the changes at any moment taking place in it.
Herbert Spencer
#45. Without painting, sculpture, music, poetry, and the emotions produced by natural beauty of every kind, life would lose half its charm.
Herbert Spencer
#46. No phrase can convey the idea of surprise so vividly as opening the eyes and raising the eyebrows. A shrug of the shoulders would lose much by translation into words.
Herbert Spencer
#47. The existence of a first cause of the universe is a necessity of thought ... Amid the mysteries which become more mysterious the more they are thought about, there will remain the one absolute certainty that we are over in the presence of an Infinite, Eternal Energy from which all things proceed.
Herbert Spencer
#48. A stern discipline pervades all nature, which is a little cruel that it may be very kind.
Herbert Spencer
#49. To play billiards well was a sign of an ill-spent youth
Herbert Spencer
#50. Opinion is ultimately determined by the feelings, and not by the intellect.
Herbert Spencer
#51. Agnostics are people who, like myself, confess themselves to be hopelessly ignorant concerning a variety of matters, about which metaphysicians and theologians, both orthodox and heterodox, dogmatize with the utmost confidence.
Herbert Spencer
#53. We do not commonly see in a tax a diminution of freedom, and yet it clearly is one.
Herbert Spencer
#54. However insignificant the minority, and however trifling the proposed trespass against their rights, no such trespass is permissible.
Herbert Spencer
#55. So long as selfishness makes government needful at all, it must make every government corrupt, save one in which all men are represented.
Herbert Spencer
#56. The authoritarian sets up some book, or man, or tradition to establish the truth. The freethinker sets up reason and private judgment to discover the truth ... It takes the highest courage to utter unpopular truths.
Herbert Spencer
#57. The fact disclosed by a survey of the past that majorities have been wrong must not blind us to the complementary fact that majorities have usually not been entirely wrong.
Herbert Spencer
#60. Conservatism defends those coercive arrangements which a still-lingering savageness makes requisite. Radicalism endeavours to realize a state more in harmony with the character of the ideal man.
Herbert Spencer
#61. In the course of social evolution, usage precedes law; and that when usage has been well established it becomes law by receiving authoritative endorsement and defined form.
Herbert Spencer
#62. Feudalism, serfdom, slavery, all tyrannical institutions, are merely the most vigorous kind to rule, springing out of, and necessarily to, a bad state of man. The progress from these is the same in all cases - less government.
Herbert Spencer
#63. Time is that which a man is always trying to kill, but which ends in killing him.
Herbert Spencer
#64. Divine right of kings means the divine right of anyone who can get uppermost.
Herbert Spencer
#65. People are beginning to see that the first requisite to success in life is to be a good animal.
Herbert Spencer
#67. And yet, strange to say, now that the truth [of natural selection] is recognized by most cultivated people ... now more than ever, in the history of the world, are they doing all they can to further the survival of the unfittest.
Herbert Spencer
#68. Evolution is an integration of matter and concomitant dissipation of motion during which the matter passes from an indefinite incoherent homogeneity to a definite coherent heterogeneity, and during which the retained motion undergoes a parallel transformation.
Herbert Spencer
#69. The more specific idea of Evolution now reached is - a change from an indefinite, incoherent homogeneity to a definite, coherent heterogeneity, accompanying the dissipation of motion and integration of matter.
Herbert Spencer
#71. Rightness expresses of actions, what straightness does of lines; and there can no more be two kinds of right action than there can be two kinds of straight lines.
Herbert Spencer
#72. The liberty the citizen enjoys is to be measured not by governmental machinery he lives under, whether representative or other, but by the paucity of restraints it imposes upon him.
Herbert Spencer
#73. The idea of disembodied spirits is wholly unsupported by evidence, and I cannot accept it.
Herbert Spencer
#74. Though, probably, no competent geologist would contend that the European classification of strata is applicable to all other parts of the globe, yet most, if not all geologists, write as though it were so.
Herbert Spencer
#75. It must be admitted that the conception of virtue cannot be separated from the conception of happiness-producing conduct.
Herbert Spencer
#76. Practical atheism, seeing no guidance for human affairs but its own limited foresight, endeavors itself to play the god, and decide what will be good for mankind and what bad.
Herbert Spencer
#77. Progress is not an accident, not a thing within human control, but a beneficent necessity ... due to the working of a universal law. So surely must the things we call evil and immorality disappear; so surely must man become perfect.
Herbert Spencer
#78. Religion is the recognition that all things are manifestations of a Power which transcends our knowledge.
Herbert Spencer
#79. When a man's knowledge is not in order, the more of it he has the greater will be his confusion.
Herbert Spencer
#80. Music ministers to human welfare more than any other art.
Herbert Spencer
#81. All socialism involves slavery. That which fundamentally distinguishes the slave is that he labours under coercion to satisfy anothers desires.
Herbert Spencer
#82. Hero-worship is strongest where there is least regard for human freedom.
Herbert Spencer
#83. It is a commonly observed fact that the enslavement of women is invariably associated with a low type of social life, and that, conversely, her elevation towards an equality with man uniformly accompanies progress.
Herbert Spencer
#84. An argument fatal to the communist theory, is suggested by the fact, that a desire for property is one of the elements of our nature.
Herbert Spencer
#85. Originally, ethics has no existence apart from religion, which holds it in solution.
Herbert Spencer
#86. Only when Genius is married to Science can the highest results be produced.
Herbert Spencer
#87. Every unpunished delinquency has a family of delinquencies.
Herbert Spencer
#88. Ethical ideas and sentiments have to be considered as parts of the phenomena of life at large. We have to deal with man as a product of evolution, with society as a product of evolution, and with moral phenomena as products of evolution.
Herbert Spencer
#89. Thus poetry, regarded as a vehicle of thought, is especially impressive partly because it obeys all the laws of effective speech, and partly because in so doing it imitates the natural utterances of excitement.
Herbert Spencer
#90. In science the important thing is to modify and change one's ideas as science advances.
Herbert Spencer
#91. A nation's institutions and beliefs are determined by it's character.
Herbert Spencer
#92. This survival of the fittest implies multiplication of the fittest.
{The phrase 'survival of the fittest' was not originated by Charles Darwin, though he discussed Spencer's 'excellent expression' in a letter to Alfred Russel Wallace (Jul 1866).}
Herbert Spencer
#93. This survival of the fittest which I have here sought to express in mechanical terms, is that which Mr. Darwin has called 'natural selection, or the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life.
Herbert Spencer
#95. If a single cell, under appropriate conditions, becomes a man in the space of a few years, there can surely be no difficulty in understanding how, under appropriate conditions, a cell may, in the course of untold millions of years, give origin to the human race.
Herbert Spencer
#96. Those whose hardships are set forth in pamphlets and proclaimed in sermons and speeches which echo throughout society, are assumed to be all worthy souls, grievously wronged; and none of them are thought of as bearing the penalties of their misdeeds.
Herbert Spencer
#97. Society exists for the benefit of its members, not the members for the benefit of society.
Herbert Spencer
#98. The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly is to fill the world with fools.
Herbert Spencer
#99. The preservation of health is a duty. Few seem conscious that there is such a thing as physical morality.
Herbert Spencer
#100. The essential trait in the moral consciousness, is the control of some feeling or feelings by some other feeling or feelings.
Herbert Spencer
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