John Lancaster Spalding Quotes

202 Sourced Quotes

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
Exercise of body and exercise of mind are supplementary, and both may be made recreative and educative.

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

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

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

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

John Lancaster Spalding
The more we live with what we imagine others think of us, the less we live with truth.

John Lancaster Spalding
There are few things it is more important to learn than how to live on little and be therewith content: for the less we need what is without, the more leisure have we to live within.

John Lancaster Spalding
They who no longer believe in principles still proclaim them, to conceal, both from themselves and others, the selfishness of the motives by which they are dominated.

John Lancaster Spalding
To think profoundly, to seek and speak truth, to love justice and denounce wrong is to draw upon one's self the ill will of many.

John Lancaster Spalding
What we think out for ourselves forms channels in which other thoughts will flow.

John Lancaster Spalding
We are not masters of the truth which is borne in upon us: it overpowers us.

John Lancaster Spalding
It is the expensiveness of our pleasures that makes the world poor and keeps us poor in ourselves. If we could but learn to find enjoyment in the things of the mind, the economic problems would solve themselves.

John Lancaster Spalding
The fields and the flowers and the beautiful faces are not ours, as the stars and the hills and the sunlight are not ours, but they give us fresh and happy thoughts.|

John Lancaster Spalding
Friends humor and flatter us, they steal our time, they encourage our love of ease, they make us content with ourselves, they are the foes of our virtue and our glory.

John Lancaster Spalding
If thou wouldst help others deal with them as though they were what they should be

John Lancaster Spalding
The doctrine of the utter vanity of life is a doctrine of despair, and life is hope.

John Lancaster Spalding
Women are aristocrats, and it is always the mother who makes us feel that we belong to the better sort.

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
Solitude is unbearable for those who can not bear themselves.

John Lancaster Spalding