Herbert Spencer Quotes

May your mind be thoroughly impressed with the absolute necessity of universal virtue and goodness, as the only sure road to happiness, and may you walk therein with undeviating steps.

It is not enough merely possess virtue, as if it were an art; it should be practiced.

Morality's not practical. Morality's a gesture. A complicated gesture learnt from books.

Take care that you entertain no notions unsuitable to virtue and reasonable nature.

As a rule of thumb I say, if Socrates, Jesus and Tolstoy wouldn't do it, don't.

The path of precept is long, that of example short and effectual.

It’s pretty simple, the ethical life. It’s just demanding.

Fundamentally, the force that rules the world is conduct, whether it be moral or immoral. If it is moral, at least there may be hope for the world. If immoral, there is not only no hope, but no prospect of anything but destruction of all that has been accomplished during the last 5,000 years.

The content of scientific theory itself offers no moral foundation for the personal conduct of life.

A man is not to aim at innocence, any more than he is to aim at hair, but he is to keep it.

I think that ethical behaviour is another feature of the kind of inner discipline that leads to a happier existence.

Reading about ethics is about as likely to improve one's behavior as reading about sports is to make one into an athlete.

It is not living that matters, but living rightly.

If you do not know the laws of right conduct, you cannot form your character.

Action indeed is the sole medium of expression for ethics.

I have a pretty keen ethical compass.

It's not always easy to do the right thing. But, doing the right thing makes you strong, it builds character.

Conscience is a man's compass, and though the needle sometimes deviates, though one often perceives irregularities in directing one's course by it, still one must try to follow its direction.

There are people who think that honesty is always the best policy. This is a superstition. There are times when the appearance of it is worth six of it.

An action is the perfection and publication of thought. A right action seems to fill the eye, and to be related to all nature.

The ultimate test of what a truth means is the conduct it dictates or inspires.

There must be in prudence also some master virtue.

I think that the greatest education in the world is the education which helps one to be able to do the right things at the time it has to be done.

That which is selfish is immoral, and that which is unselfish is moral.

In ethics, prudence is not an important virtue, but in the world it is almost everything.