Top 140 Herbert Spencer Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “Objects we ardently pursue bring little happiness when gained; most of our pleasures come from unexpected sources.”

— Herbert Spencer

52. “Life is not for learning nor is life for working, but learning and working are for life.”

— Herbert Spencer

53. “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

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

— Herbert Spencer

55. “The wise man must remember that while he is a descendant of the past, he is a parent of the future.”

— Herbert Spencer

56. “The preservation of health is a duty. Few seem conscious that there is such a thing as physical morality.”

— Herbert Spencer

57. “Marriage: A word which should be pronounced “mirage”.”

— Herbert Spencer

58. “The essential trait in the moral consciousness, is the control of some feeling or feelings by some other feeling or feelings.”

— Herbert Spencer

59. “Do not try to produce an ideal child, it would find no fitness in this world.”

— Herbert Spencer

60. “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

61. “Much dearer be the things which come through hard distress.”

— Herbert Spencer

62. “That feelings of love and hate make rational judgments impossible in public affairs, as in private affairs, we can clearly enough see in others, though not so clearly in ourselves.”

— Herbert Spencer

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

— Herbert Spencer

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

— Herbert Spencer

65. “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

66. “The child takes most of his nature of the mother, besides speech, manners, and inclination.”

— Herbert Spencer

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

— Herbert Spencer

68. “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

69. “A living thing is distinguished from a dead thing by the multiplicity of the changes at any moment taking place in it.”

— Herbert Spencer

70. “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.”

— Herbert Spencer

71. “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

72. “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

73. “When a man’s knowledge is not in order, the more of it he has the greater will be his confusion.”

— Herbert Spencer

74. “A stern discipline pervades all nature, which is a little cruel that it may be very kind.”

— Herbert Spencer

75. “The saying that beauty is but skin deep, is but a skin-deep saying.”

— Herbert Spencer

76. “Never educate a child to be a gentleman or lady alone, but to be a man, a woman.”

— Herbert Spencer

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

— Herbert Spencer

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

— Herbert Spencer

79. “Truth generally lies in the coordination of antagonistic opinions.”

— Herbert Spencer

80. “In science the important thing is to modify and change one’s ideas as science advances.”

— Herbert Spencer

81. “A jury is composed of twelve men of average ignorance.”

— Herbert Spencer

82. “Policeman are soldiers who act alone; soldiers are policeman who act in unison.”

— Herbert Spencer

83. “No one can be perfectly happy till all are happy.”

— Herbert Spencer

84. “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

85. “All socialism involves slavery.”

— Herbert Spencer

86. “If every man has freedom to do all that he wills, provided he infringes not the equal freedom of any other man, then he is free to drop connection with the state-to relinquish its protection, and to refuse paying toward its support.”

— Herbert Spencer

87. “Every man may claim the fullest liberty to exercise his faculties compatible with the possession of like liberties by every other man.”

— Herbert Spencer

88. “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

89. “However insignificant the minority, and however trifling the proposed trespass against their rights, no such trespass is permissible.”

— Herbert Spencer

90. “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

91. “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

92. “The greatest of all infidelities is the fear that the truth will be bad.”

— Herbert Spencer

93. “The ideal form for a poem, essay, or fiction, is that which the ideal writer would evolve spontaneously. One in whom the powers of expression fully responded to the state of feeling, would unconsciously use that variety in the mode of presenting his thoughts, which Art demands.”

— Herbert Spencer

94. “Every unpunished delinquency has a family of delinquencies.”

— Herbert Spencer

95. “Volumes might be written upon the impiety of the pious.”

— 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. “Whatever fosters militarism makes for barbarism; whatever fosters peace makes for civilization.”

— Herbert Spencer

98. “Those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded.”

— Herbert Spencer

99. “The most important attribute of man as a moral being is the faculty of self-control.”

— Herbert Spencer

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

— Herbert Spencer