"I can look a whole day with delight upon a handsome picture, though it be but of a horse. It is my temper, & I like it the better, to affect all harmony, and sure there is music even in the beauty, and the silent note which Cupid strikes, far sweeter than the sound of an instrument. For there is a music wherever there is a harmony, order or proportion; and thus far we may maintain the music of the spheres."

"I could be content that we might procreate like trees, without conjunction, or that there were any way to perpetuate the world without this trivial and vulgar act of coition; It is the foolishest act a wise man commits in all his life, nor is there anything that will more deject his cooled imagination, when he shall consider what an odd and unworthy piece of folly he hath committed."

"But how shall we expect charity towards others, when we are uncharitable to ourselves? Charity begins at home, is the voice of the world, yet is every man his greatest enemy, and as it were, his own executioner."

"No man can justly censure or condemn another, because indeed no man truly knows another."

"They that endeavour to abolish vice destroy also virtue, for contraries, though they destroy one another, are yet the life of one another."

"I intend no Monopoly, but a Community in Learning; I study not for my own sake only, but for theirs that study not for themselves."

"There is surely a Physiognomy, which those experienced and Master Mendicants observe… For there are mystically in our faces certain Characters that carry in them the motto of our Souls, wherein he that cannot read A.B.C. may read our natures."

"It is the common wonder of all men, how among so many million of faces there should be none alike."

"There is no road or ready way to virtue."

"The heart of man is the place the devil dwells in; I feel sometimes a hell within myself."

"How shall the dead arise, is no question of my faith; to believe only possibilities, is not faith, but mere philosophy."

"I believe the world grows near its end, yet is neither old nor decayed, nor will ever perish upon the ruins of its own principles."

"We vainly accuse the fury of guns, and the new inventions of death; it is in the power of every hand to destroy us, and we are beholden unto every one we meet he doth not kill us."

"Men that look no further than their outsides, think health an appurtenance unto life, and quarrel with their constitutions for being sick; but I that have examined the parts of man, and know upon what tender filaments that fabric hangs, do wonder that we are not always so; and considering the thousand doors that lead to death, do thank my God that we can die but once."

"I am not so much afraid of death, as ashamed thereof; 'tis the very disgrace and ignominy of our natures, that in a moment can so disfigure us that our nearest friends, Wife, and Children stand afraid and start at us."

"This reasonable moderator, and equal piece of justice, Death."

"Thus is man that great and true Amphibium, whose nature is disposed to live not only like other creatures in diverse elements, but in divided and distinguished worlds."

"Persecution is a bad and indirect way to plant Religion."

"Obstinacy in a bad cause, is but constancy in a good."

"All things are artificial, for nature is the Art of God."

"Art is the perfection of nature."

"We carry with us the wonders, we seek without us: There is all Africa, and her prodigies in us; we are that bold and adventurous piece of nature, which he that studies, wisely learns in a compendium, what others labour at in a divided piece and endless volume."

"The severe Schools shall never laugh me out of the Philosophy of Hermes, that this visible world is but a picture of the invisible."

"I have often admired the mystical way of Pythagoras, and the secret Magic of numbers."

"I love to lose myself in a mystery to pursue my reason to an O altitudo."

"Rich with the spoils of Nature."

"A man may be in as just possession of Truth as of a City, and yet be forced to surrender."

"I could never divide myself from any man upon the difference of an opinion, or be angry with his judgement for not agreeing with me in that, from which perhaps within a few days I should dissent myself."

"Who will not commend the wit of astrology? Venus, born out of the sea, hath her exaltation in Pisces."

"When we desire to confine our words, we commonly say they are spoken under the rose."

"Spencer had a photo of Marian (George Eliot) in his bedroom until the day he died. The sisters who kept house for him in the 1890s used to tease him about it. "What a long nose she had! She must have been very difficult to kiss, Mr Spencer!" "Yes indeed! he brightly acquiesced, to our intense delight at the apparent admission. He laughingly protested he was speaking theoretically; but would Herbert Spencer, the philosopher, have generalised from an a priori reasoning?""

"Herbert Spencer, who was ever undone by his love of classification."

"In the words of Herbert Spencer, I would say that “in proportion as the principle of voluntary cooperation more and more characterizes the social type, the implied assertion of equality in... rights become the fundamental requirement of... law.""

"One of the factors that caused Spencer's ideas to lose popularity was social Darwinism... Social evolution is different from biological evolution: it's faster, it's Lamarckian, and it makes even heavier use of altruism and cooperation than biological evolution does. None of this was well understood at the time."

"Spencer argued in a very articulate way for the communality of these processes of self-organization, and used his ideas to make a theory of sociology. However, he was not able to put these ideas into mathematical form or argue them from first principles. And no one else has, either — doing so is perhaps the central problem in the study of complex systems."

"There is a principle which is a bar against all information, which is proof against all arguments and which cannot fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance — that principle is contempt prior to investigation."

"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."

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

"As there must be moderation in other things, so there must be moderation in self-criticism. Perpetual contemplation of our own actions produces a morbid consciousness, quite unlike that normal consciousness accompanying right actions spontaneously done; and from a state of unstable equilibrium long maintained by effort, there is apt to be a fall towards stable equilibrium, in which the primitive nature reasserts itself. Retrogression rather than progression may hence result."

"Ethical ideas and sentiments have to be considered as parts of the phenomena of life at large. We have to deal with man as a product of evolution, with society as a product of evolution, and with moral phenomena as products of evolution."

"How often misused words generate misleading thoughts!"

"Originally, ethics has no existence apart from religion, which holds it in solution."

"He who carries self-regard far enough to keep himself in good health and high spirits, in the first place thereby becomes an immediate source of happiness to those around, and in the second place maintains the ability to increase their happiness by altruistic actions. But one whose bodily vigour and mental health are undermined by self-sacrifice carried too far, in the first place becomes to those around a cause of depression, and in the second place renders himself incapable, or less capable, of actively furthering their welfare. In estimating conduct we must remember that there are those who by their joyousness beget joy in others, and that there are those who by their melancholy cast a gloom on every circle they enter."

"The pursuit of individual happiness within those limits prescribed by social conditions, is the first requisite to the attainment of the greatest general happiness."

"If insistence on them tends to unsettle established systems ... self-evident truths are by most people silently passed over; or else there is a tacit refusal to draw from them the most obvious inferences."

"People ... become so preoccupied with the means by which an end is achieved, as eventually to mistake it for the end. Just as money, which is a means of satisfying wants, comes to be regarded by a miser as the sole thing to be worked for, leaving the wants unsatisfied; so the conduct men have found preferable because most conducive to happiness, has come to be thought of as intrinsically preferable: not only to be made a proximate end (which it should be), but to be made an ultimate end, to the exclusion of the true ultimate end."

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

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

"Every pleasure raises the tide of life; every pain lowers the tide of life."