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Objects we ardently pursue bring little happiness when gained; most of our pleasures come from unexpected sources.
Herbert Spencer -
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
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Feudalism, serfdom, slavery — all tyrannical institutions, are merely the most vigorous kinds of rule, springing out of, and necessary to, a bad state of man. The progress from these is in all cases the same — less government.
Herbert Spencer -
The authoritarian sets up some book, or man, or tradition to establish the truth. The freethinker sets up reason and private judgment to discover the truth... It takes the highest courage to utter unpopular truths.
Herbert Spencer -
Divine right of kings means the divine right of anyone who can get uppermost.
Herbert Spencer -
Organs, faculties, powers, capacities, or whatever else we call them; grow by use and diminish from disuse, it is inferred that they will continue to do so. And if this inference is unquestionable, then is the one above deduced from it-that humanity must in the end become completely adapted to its conditions-unquestionable also. Progress, therefore, is not an accident, but a necessity.
Herbert Spencer -
No philosopher's stone of a constitution can produce golden conduct from leaden instincts.
Herbert Spencer -
Time: That which man is always trying to kill, but which ends in killing him.
Herbert Spencer
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The child takes most of his nature of the mother, besides speech, manners, and inclination.
Herbert Spencer -
Any piece of knowledge which the pupil has himself acquired- any problem which he has himself solved, becomes, by virtue of the conquest, much more thoroughly his than it could else be. The preliminary activity of mind which his success implies, the concentration of thought necessary to it, and the excitement consequent on his triumph, conspire to register the facts in his memory in a way that no mere information heard from a teacher, or read in a schoolbook, can be registered.
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 -
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 -
Progress is not an accident, not a thing within human control, but a beneficent necessity ... due to the working of a universal law. So surely must the things we call evil and immorality disappear; so surely must man become perfect.
Herbert Spencer -
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
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The great aim of education is not knowledge but action.
Herbert Spencer -
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!
Herbert Spencer -
Liberty is not the right of one, but of all.
Herbert Spencer -
Every pleasure raises the tide of life; every pain lowers the tide of life.
Herbert Spencer -
All evil results from the non-adaptation of constitution to conditions. This is true of everything that lives. Does a shrub dwindle in poor soil, or become sickly when deprived of light, or die outright if removed to a cold climate? it is because the harmony between its organization and its circumstances has been destroyed.
Herbert Spencer -
Noiseless falls the foot of time That only treads on flowers.
Herbert Spencer
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The presumption that any current opinion is not wholly false, gains in strength according to the number of its adherents.
Herbert Spencer -
Aggression which is flagitious when committed by one, is not sanctioned when committed by a host.
Herbert Spencer -
In science the important thing is to modify and change one's ideas as science advances.
Herbert Spencer -
Mental power cannot be got from ill-fed brains.
Herbert Spencer