72 quotes
Opinion is ultimately determined by the feelings, and not by the intellect.
Social Statics (1851)
The essential trait in the moral consciousness, is the control of some feeling or feelings by some other feeling or feelings.
The Principles of Ethics (1897)
Every unpunished delinquency has a family of delinquencies.
Sociology. in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922)
Volumes might be written upon the impiety of the pious.
How often misused words generate misleading thoughts!
The Principles of Ethics (1897)
The education of the child must accord both in mode and arrangement with the education of mankind, considered historically.
Education: Intellectual, Moral, and Physical (1861)
Strong as it looks at the outset, State-agency perpetually disappoints every one. Puny as are its first stages, private efforts daily achieve results that astound the world.
Essays: Scientific, Political, and Speculative (1891)
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.
Facts and Comments (1902)
Equity knows no difference of sex. In its vocabulary the word man must be understood in a generic, and not in a specific sense.
Social Statics (1851)
The primary use of knowledge is for such guidance of conduct under all circumstances as shall make living complete. All other uses of knowledge are secondary.
Essays: Scientific, Political, and Speculative (1891)
He cannot be coerced into political combination without a breach of the law of equal freedom; he can withdraw from it without committing any such breach; and he has therefore a right so to withdraw.
Social Statics (1851)
Every cause produces more than one effect.
Essays on Education (1861)
Evolution is definable as a change from an incoherent homogeneity to a coherent heterogeneity, accompanying the dissipation of motion and integration of matter.
If a single cell, under appropriate conditions, becomes a man in the space of a few years, there can surely be no difficulty in understanding how, under appropriate conditions, a cell may, in the course of untold millions of years, give origin to the human race.
Principles of Biology (1864)
People ... become so preoccupied with the means by which an end is achieved, as eventually to mistake it for the end.
The Principles of Ethics (1897)
Evolution is a change from an indefinite, incoherent, homogeneity to a definite, coherent, heterogeneity, through continuous differentiations and integrations.
If there be an order in which the human race has mastered its various kinds of knowledge, there will arise in every child an aptitude to acquire these kinds of knowledge in the same order.
Education: Intellectual, Moral, and Physical (1861)
Architecture, sculpture, painting, music, and poetry, may truly be called the efflorescence of civilised life.
Essays on Education (1861)
Limiting the liberty of each by the like liberty of all, excludes a wide range of improper actions, but does not exclude certain other improper ones.
Social Statics (1851)
Thus poetry, regarded as a vehicle of thought, is especially impressive partly because it obeys all the laws of effective speech, and partly because in so doing it imitates the natural utterances of excitement.
The Philosophy of Style (1852)