Herbert Spencer Quotes
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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.
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Architecture, sculpture, painting, music, and poetry, may truly be called the efflorescence of civilised life.
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The idea of disembodied spirits is wholly unsupported by evidence, and I cannot accept it.
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Aggression which is flagitious when committed by one, is not sanctioned when committed by a host.
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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.
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Objects we ardently pursue bring little happiness when gained; most of our pleasures come from unexpected sources.
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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.
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Divine right of kings means the divine right of anyone who can get uppermost.
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There can be little question that good composition is far less dependent upon acquaintance with its laws, than upon practice and natural aptitude. A clear head, a quick imagination, and a sensitive ear, will go far towards making all rhetorical precepts needless.
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This survival of the fittest implies multiplication of the fittest.
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Pervading all nature we may see at work a stern discipline , which is a little cruel that it may be very kind.
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Every man may claim the fullest liberty to exercise his faculties compatible with the possession of like liberties by every other man.
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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.
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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.
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The defects of the children mirror the defects of the parents.
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The greatest of all infidelities is the fear that the truth will be bad.
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The great aim of education is not knowledge but action.
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Every unpunished delinquency has a family of delinquencies.
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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.
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Liberty is not the right of one, but of all.
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When a man's knowledge is not in order, the more of it he has the greater will be his confusion.
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The Republican form of government is the highest form of government: but because of this it requires the highest type of human nature, a type nowhere at present existing.
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And yet, strange to say, now that this truth is recognized by most cultivated people — now that the beneficent working of the survival of the fittest has been so impressed on them that, much more than people in past times, they might be expected to hesitate before neutralizing its action — now more than ever before in the history of the world, are they doing all they can to further survival of the unfittest!
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Mental power cannot be got from ill-fed brains.