Herbert Spencer Quotes

To have a specific style is to be poor in speech.

In the supremacy of self-control consists one of the perfections of the ideal man.

So long as selfishness makes government needful at all, it must make every government corrupt, save one in which all men are represented.

Every pleasure raises the tide of life; every pain lowers the tide of life.

With a higher moral nature will come a restriction on the multiplication of the inferior.

The presumption that any current opinion is not wholly false, gains in strength according to the number of its adherents.

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.

There is no origin for the idea of an afterlife, save the conclusion which the savage draws from the notion suggested by dreams.

Without painting, sculpture, music, poetry, and the emotions produced by natural beauty of every kind, life would lose half its charm.

Music ministers to human welfare more than any other art.

It is the function of parents to see that their children habitually experience the true consequences of their conduct.

If they are sufficiently complete to live, they do live, and it is well they should live. If they are not sufficiently complete to live, they die, and it is best they should die.

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.

Evil perpetually tends to disappear.

Our lives are universally shortened by our ignorance.

Religion is the recognition that all things are manifestations of a Power which transcends our knowledge.

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

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.

So far from science being irreligious, as many think, it is the neglect of science that is irreligious-it is the refusal to study the surrounding creation that is irreligious.

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.

Absolute morality is the regulation of conduct in such a way that pain shall not be inflicted.

Originally, ethics has no existence apart from religion, which holds it in solution.

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.

Though, probably, no competent geologist would contend that the European classification of strata is applicable to the globe as a whole; yet most, if not all geologists, write as though it were so.

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.

They who employ force by proxy are as much responsible for that force as though they employed it themselves.

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.

Time is that which man is always trying to kill but which ends in killing him.

Music must take rank as the highest of the fine arts - as the one which, more than any other, ministers to the human spirit.

Marriage: A word which should be pronounced 'mirage'.

All socialism involves slavery.

Society exists for the benefit of its members, not the members for the benefit of society.