Top 140 Herbert Spencer Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The great aim of education is not knowledge but action.”

— Herbert Spencer

2. “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

3. “This survival of the fittest implies multiplication of the fittest.”

— Herbert Spencer

4. “Be bold, be bold, and everywhere be bold.”

— Herbert Spencer

5. “Time is that which a man is always trying to kill, but which ends in killing him.”

— Herbert Spencer

6. “What a cage is to the wild beast, law is to the selfish man.”

— Herbert Spencer

7. “Hero-worship is strongest where there is least regard for human freedom.”

— Herbert Spencer

8. “Education is preparation to live completely.”

— Herbert Spencer

9. “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

10. “Love is life’s end, but never ending. Love is life’s wealth, never spent, but ever spending. Love’s life’s reward, rewarded in rewarding.”

— Herbert Spencer

11. “To play billiards well was a sign of an ill-spent youth.”

— Herbert Spencer

12. “Every man is free to do that which he wills, provided he infringes not the equal freedom of any other man.”

— Herbert Spencer

13. “Morality knows nothing of geographical boundaries, or distinctions of race.”

— Herbert Spencer

14. “Society exists for the benefit of its members – not the members for the benefit of society.”

— Herbert Spencer

15. “During human progress, every science is evolved out of its corresponding art.”

— Herbert Spencer

16. “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.”

— Herbert Spencer

17. “Mental power cannot be got from ill-fed brains.”

— Herbert Spencer

18. “The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly, is to fill the world with fools.”

— Herbert Spencer

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

— Herbert Spencer

20. “Life is the continuous adjustment of internal relations to external relations.”

— Herbert Spencer

21. “The defects of the children mirror the defects of the parents.”

— Herbert Spencer

22. “No one can be perfectly free till all are free; no one can be perfectly moral till all are moral; no one can be perfectly happy till all are happy.”

— Herbert Spencer

23. “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

24. “A function to each organ, and each organ to its own function, is the law of all organization.”

— Herbert Spencer

25. “How often misused words generate misleading thoughts.”

— Herbert Spencer

26. “Education has for its object the formation of character.”

— Herbert Spencer

27. “Reading is seeing by proxy.”

— Herbert Spencer

28. “Those who cavalierly reject the Theory of Evolution, as not adequately supported by facts, seem quite to forget that their own theory it supported by no facts at all.”

— Herbert Spencer

29. “Science is organized knowledge.”

— Herbert Spencer

30. “Only when Genius is married to Science can the highest results be produced.”

— Herbert Spencer

31. “Government is essentially immoral.”

— Herbert Spencer

32. “Evil perpetually tends to disappear.”

— Herbert Spencer

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

— Herbert Spencer

34. “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

35. “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

36. “Opinion is ultimately determined by the feelings, and not by the intellect.”

— Herbert Spencer

37. “The tyrant is nothing but a slave turned inside out.”

— Herbert Spencer

38. “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

39. “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

40. “We all decry prejudice, yet are all prejudiced.”

— Herbert Spencer

41. “The universal basis of co-operation is the proportioning of benefits received to services rendered.”

— Herbert Spencer

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

— Herbert Spencer

43. “Civilization is a progress from an indefinite, incoherent homogeneity toward a definite, coherent heterogeneity.”

— Herbert Spencer

44. “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

45. “Marriage: a ceremony in which rings are put on the finger of the lady and through the nose of the gentleman.”

— Herbert Spencer

46. “Our lives are universally shortened by our ignorance.”

— Herbert Spencer

47. “Music ministers to human welfare more than any other art.”

— Herbert Spencer

48. “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

49. “All socialism involves slavery.”

— Herbert Spencer

50. “People are beginning to see that the first requisite to success in life is to be a good animal.”

— Herbert Spencer