John Lancaster Spalding Quotes
-
We may avoid much disappointment and bitterness of soul by learning to understand how little necessary to our joy and peace are the things the multitude most desire and seek.
-
As display is vulgar, so fondness for jewelry is evidence of an uncultivated mind.
-
Inferior thinking and writing will make a name for a man among inferior people, who in all ages and countries, are the majority.
-
We are made ridiculous less by our defects than by the affectation of qualities which are not ours.
-
The more we live with what we imagine others think of us, the less we live with truth.
-
The first requisite of a gentleman is to be true, brave and noble, and to be therefore a rebuke and scandal to venal and vulgar souls.
-
If thou wouldst help others deal with them as though they were what they should be
-
The doubt of an earnest, thoughtful, patient and laborious mind is worthy of respect. In such doubt may be found indeed more faith than in half the creeds.
-
Be watchful lest thou lose the power of desiring and loving what appeals to the soul-this is the miser’s curse-this the chain and ball the sensualist drags.
-
If we learn from those only, of whose lives and opinions we altogether approve, we shall have to turn from many of the highest and profoundest minds.
-
Break not the will of the young, but guide it to right ends.
-
Rules of grammar can not give us a mastery of language, rules of rhetoric can not make us eloquent, rules of conduct can not make us good.
-
The study of law is valuable as a mental discipline, but the practice of pleading tends to make one petty, formal, and insincere. To be driven to look to legality rather than to equity blurs the view of truth and justice.
-
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.
-
If we are disappointed that men give little heed to what we utter is it for their sake or our own?
-
In education, as in religion and love, compulsion thwarts the purpose for which it is employed.
-
Dislike of another’s opinions and beliefs neither justifies our own nor makes us more certain of them: and to transfer the repugnance to the person himself is a mark of a vulgar mind.
-
When the mind has grasped the matter, words come like flowers at the call of spring.
-
They who truly know have had to unlearn hardly less than they have had to learn.
-
Insight makes argument ridiculous.
-
We do not find it hard to bear with ourselves, though we are full of faults. Why then may we not learn to be tolerant of others?
-
The test of the worth of work is its effect on the worker. If it degrade him, it is bad; if it ennoble him, it is good.
-
They whom trifles distract and nothing occupies are but children.
-
To think of education as a means of preserving institutions however excellent, is to have a superficial notion of its end and purpose, which is to mould and fashion men who are more than institutions, who create, outgrow, and re-create them.