Herbert Spencer Quotes

166 Sourced Quotes

It must be admitted that the conception of virtue cannot be separated from the conception of happiness-producing conduct.

Herbert Spencer
The behavior of men to the lower animals and their behavior to each other, bear a constant relationship.

Herbert Spencer
This speck of animated jelly [amoeba] is at once all stomach, all skin, all mouth, all limb, and doubtless, too, all lung.

Herbert Spencer
Government is essentially immoral. The State employs evil weapons to subjugate evil, and is alike contaminated by the objects with which it deals, and the means by which it works.

Herbert Spencer
The more numerous public instrumentalities become, the more is there generated in citizens the notion that everything is to be done for them, and nothing by them. Every generation is made less familiar with the attainment of desired ends by individual actions or private agencies; until, eventually, governmental agencies come to be thought of as the only available agencies.

Herbert Spencer
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
Where there are no distinctions of structure there are no distinctions of function.

Herbert Spencer
In assuming any office besides its essential one, the State begins to lose the power of fulfilling its essential one.

Herbert Spencer
Of all antagonisms of belief, the oldest, the widest, the most profound and the most important, is that between Religion and Science. It commenced when the recognition of the simplest uniformities in surrounding things, set a limit to the once universal superstition.

Herbert Spencer
Pervading all nature we may see at work a stern discipline, which is a little cruel that it may be very kind.

Herbert Spencer
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
We conclude, then, that for discipline, as well as for guidance, science is of chiefest value. In all its effects, learning the meanings of things, is better than learning the meanings of words. Whether for intellectual, moral, or religious training, the study of surrounding phenomena is immensely superior to the study of grammars and lexicons.

Herbert Spencer
Be there be or be there not any other revelation, we have a veritable revelation in Science - a continuous disclosure, through the intelligence with which we are endowed, of the established order of the Universe.

Herbert Spencer
Positive knowledge does not, and never can, fill the whole region of possible thought. At the uttermost reach of discovery there arises, and must ever arise, the question - What lies beyond?

Herbert Spencer
Courage is worthy of respect when displayed in the maintenance of legitimate claims and in the repelling of aggressions, bodily or other. Courage is worthy of yet higher respect when danger is faced in defence of claims common to self and others, as in resistance to invasion. Courage is worthy of the highest respect when risk to life or limb is dared in defence of others.

Herbert Spencer
Whoever at the seaside has not had a microscope and aquariam, has yet to learn what the highest pleasures of the seaside are.

Herbert Spencer
Either unknowingly or in spite of themselves, Nature leads men by purely personal motives to fulfil her ends: Nature being one of our expressions for the Ultimate Cause of things, and the end, remote when not proximate, being the highest form of human life.

Herbert Spencer
We hear a great deal about "the vile body;" and many are encouraged by the phrase to transgress the laws of health. But Nature quietly suppresses those who treat thus disrespectfully one of her highest products, and leaves the world to be peopled by the descendants of those who are not so foolish.

Herbert Spencer
It is a mistake to assume that government must necessarily last forever. The institution marks a certain stage of civilization-is natural to a particular phase of human development. It is not essential, but incidental. As amongst the Bushmen we find a state antecedent to government, so may there be one in which it shall have become extinct.

Herbert Spencer
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
Regarding language as an apparatus of symbols for the conveyance of thought, we may say that, as in a mechanical apparatus, the more simple and the better arranged its parts, the greater will be the effect produced.

Herbert Spencer
The present relationship existing between husband and wife, where one claims a command over the actions of the other, is nothing more than a remnant of the old leaven of slavery. It is necessarily destructive of refined love; for how can a man continue to regard as his type of the ideal a being whom he has, be denying an equality of privilege with himself, degraded to something below himself?

Herbert Spencer
Even the absurdest report may in nearly every instance be traced to an actual occurrence; and had there been no such actual occurrence, this preposterous misrepresentation of it would never have existed. Though the distorted or magnified image transmitted to us through the refracting medium of rumour, is utterly unlike the reality; yet in the absence of the reality there would have been no distorted or magnified image.

Herbert Spencer
Scientific truths, of whatever order, are reached by eliminating perturbing or conflicting factors, and recognizing only fundamental factors.

Herbert Spencer
What knowledge is of most worth? — the uniform reply is — Science. This is the verdict on all counts.

Herbert Spencer
Music may appeal to crude and coarse feelings or to refined and noble ones; and in so far as it does the latter it awakens the higher nature and works an effect, though but a transitory effect, of a beneficial kind. But the primary purpose of music is neither instruction nor culture but pleasure; and this is an all-sufficient purpose.

Herbert Spencer
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
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
If we contemplate the order of nature, we see that everywhere vast results are brought about by accumulations of minute actions.

Herbert Spencer
The cruelty of a Fijian god, who, represented as devouring the souls of the dead, may be supposed to inflict torture during the process, is small compared with the cruelty of a God who condemns men to tortures which are eternal.

Herbert Spencer