John Lancaster Spalding Quotes

202 Sourced Quotes

It is a common error to imagine that to be stirring and voluble in a worthy cause is to be good and to do good.

John Lancaster Spalding
As a brave man goes into fire or flood or pestilence to save a human life, so a generous mind follows after truth and love, and is not frightened from the pursuit by danger or toil or obloquy.

John Lancaster Spalding
As our power over others increases, we become less free; for to retain it, we must make ourselves its servants.

John Lancaster Spalding
Culture makes the whole world our dwelling place; our palace in which we take our ease and find ourselves at one with all things.

John Lancaster Spalding
Since the mass of mankind are too ignorant or too indolent to think seriously, if majorities are right it is by accident.

John Lancaster Spalding
If thou canst not hold the golden mean, say and do too little rather than too much.

John Lancaster Spalding
Agitators and declaimers may heat the blood, but they do not illumine the mind.

John Lancaster Spalding
When one sense has been bribed the others readily bear false witness.

John Lancaster Spalding
Where it is the chief aim to teach many things, little education is given or received.

John Lancaster Spalding
A principal aim of education is to give students a taste for literature, for the books of life and power, and to accomplish this, it is necessary that their minds be held aloof from the babblement and discussions of the hour, that they may accustom themselves to take interest in the words and deeds of the greatest men, and so make themselves able and worthy to shape a larger and nobler future; but if their hours of leisure are spent over journals and reviews, they will, in later years, become the helpless victims of the newspaper habit.

John Lancaster Spalding
A liberal education is that which aims to develop faculty without ulterior views of profession or other means of gaining a livelihood. It considers man an end in himself and not an instrument whereby something is to be wrought. Its ideal is human perfection.

John Lancaster Spalding
It is the tendency of the study of science to make us patient, humble and attentive to the smallest things. Is not this part of religion?

John Lancaster Spalding
They who truly know have had to unlearn hardly less than they have had to learn.

John Lancaster Spalding
If we are disappointed that men give little heed to what we utter is it for their sake or our own?

John Lancaster Spalding
To clothe truth in fitting words is to feel a satisfaction like that which comes of doing good deeds.

John Lancaster Spalding
It is difficult to be sure of our friends, but it is possible to be certain of our loyalty to them.

John Lancaster Spalding
Believe in no triumph which is won by the deadening of human faculty or the dwarfing of human life. Strive for truth and love, not for victory.

John Lancaster Spalding
What a wise man knows seems so plain and simple to himself that he easily makes the mistake of thinking it to be so for others.

John Lancaster Spalding
They whom trifles distract and nothing occupies are but children.

John Lancaster Spalding
In our thrifty populations of merchants, manufacturers, politicians, and professional men, there is little sense for beauty, little pure thought, little genuine culture; but they are prosperous and self-satisfied.

John Lancaster Spalding
If truth make us not truthful, what service can it render us?

John Lancaster Spalding
In the world of thought a man's rank is determined, not by his average work, but by his highest achievement.

John Lancaster Spalding
God has not made a world which suits all; how shall a sane man expect to please all?

John Lancaster Spalding
Beauty lies not in the things we see, but in the soul.

John Lancaster Spalding
As they are the bravest who require no witnesses to their deeds of daring, so they are the best who do right without thinking whether or not it shall be known.

John Lancaster Spalding
When with all thy heart thou strivest to live with truth and love, couldst thou do anything better? … If this be thy life, thou shalt not deem it a misfortune to lack the things men most crave and toil for.

John Lancaster Spalding
A gentleman does not appear to know more or to be more than those with whom he is thrown into company.

John Lancaster Spalding
As the savages whom we have instructed are ready when left to themselves to return to their ancestral mode of life, so our young people quickly forget what they have learned at school, and sink back into the commonplace existence from which a right education would have saved them.

John Lancaster Spalding
True readers … are ready to go through a whole volume, if there be but hope of finding in it a single genuine thought or the mere suggestion even of a truth which has some fresh application to life.

John Lancaster Spalding
More inspiring and interesting teaching alone can make progress in education possible: for such teaching alone has power to produce greater self-activity, greater concentration of mind, greater desire to learn not only how to get a living, but how to live.

John Lancaster Spalding