John Lancaster Spalding Quotes

202 Sourced Quotes

If we fail to interest, whether because we are dull and heavy, or because our hearers are so, we teach in vain.

John Lancaster Spalding
Be content that others have position, if thou hast ability: that others have riches, if thou hast virtue.

John Lancaster Spalding
Love finds us young and keeps us so: immortal himself, he permits not age to enter the hearts where he reigns.

John Lancaster Spalding
Conversation injures more than it benefits. Men talk to escape from themselves, from sheer dread of silence. Reflection makes them uncomfortable, and they find distraction in a noise of words. They seek not the company of those who might enlighten and improve them, but that of whoever can divert and amuse them. Thus the intercourse which ought to be a chief means of education, is for the most part, the occasion of mental and moral enfeeblement.

John Lancaster Spalding
The power of free will is developed and confirmed by increasing the number of worthy motives which influence conduct.

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

John Lancaster Spalding
Philosophers and theologians, like the vulgar, prefer contradiction to enlightenment. They refute one another more gladly than they learn from one another, as though man lived by shunning error and not by loving truth. Accept their formulas and they sink back into their easy chairs and comfortably doze.

John Lancaster Spalding
The strong man is he who knows how and is able to become and be himself; the magnanimous man is he who, being strong, knows how and is able to issue forth from himself, as from a fortress, to guide, protect, encourage, and save others.

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
Solitude is unbearable for those who can not bear themselves.

John Lancaster Spalding
No pure delight cheers the farmer whose mind is intent on the price he shall get for his crops rather than on the joy there is in tilling them and seeing them grow and ripen: for such an one does not love the land nor his home nor any of the most beautiful and sacred things, but tends to become like the brute that eats and sleeps and dies. His thoughts are with what feeds the animal, and that which nourishes the human is hidden from him.

John Lancaster Spalding
If our opinions rest upon solid ground, those who attack them do not make us angry, but themselves ridiculous.

John Lancaster Spalding
The world is chiefly a mental fact. From mind it receives the forms of time and space, the principle of casuality[sic], color, warmth, and beauty. Were there no mind, there would be no world.

John Lancaster Spalding
The weak, when they have authority, surround themselves with the weak. It is, indeed, a vice of rulers that men who have exceptional ability and worth are offensive to them, since they whose greatness is due to their position find it difficult to love those whom inner power makes great.

John Lancaster Spalding
The mind perceives … that it is higher than institutions, which are but the woof and web of its thought and will, which it weaves and outgrows, and weaves again.

John Lancaster Spalding
Place before thyself the ideal of perfection, not that of happiness, for by doing what makes thee wiser and better, thou shalt find the peace and joy in which happiness consists.

John Lancaster Spalding
A hobby is the result of a distorted view of things. It is putting a planet in the place of a sun.

John Lancaster Spalding
The happiness of the ignorant is but an animal's paradise.

John Lancaster Spalding
We may outgrow the things of children, without acquiring sense and relish for those which become a man.

John Lancaster Spalding
We neglect the opportunities which are always present, and imagine that if those that are rare were offered, we should put them to good use. Thus we waste life waiting for what if it came we should be unprepared for.

John Lancaster Spalding
When pleasure is made a business, it ceases to be pleasure.

John Lancaster Spalding
Taste, of which the proverb says there should be no dispute, is precisely the subject which needs discussion.

John Lancaster Spalding
If thou wouldst be interesting, keep thy personality in the background, and be great and strong in and through thy subject.

John Lancaster Spalding
Each individual bears within himself an ideal man, and to bring him forth in perfect form is his divinely imposed life-work.

John Lancaster Spalding