John Lancaster Spalding Quotes
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The happiness of the ignorant is but an animal’s paradise.
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What we acquire with joy, we possess with indifference.
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The common prejudice against philosophy is the result of the incapacity of the multitude to deal with the highest problems.
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When guests enter the room their entertainers rise to receive them; and in all meetings men should ascend into their higher selves, imparting to one another only the best they know and love.
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Not to be able to utter one’s thought without giving offence, is to lack culture.
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They who think they know all, learn nothing.
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If thy friends tire of thee, remember that it is human to tire of everything.
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We may outgrow the things of children, without acquiring sense and relish for those which become a man.
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The world is a mirror into which we look, and see our own image.
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Those subjects have the greatest educational value, which are richest in incentives to the noblest self-activity.
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Taste, of which the proverb says there should be no dispute, is precisely the subject which needs discussion.
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As the visit of one we love makes the whole day pleasant, so is it illumined and made fair by a brave and beautiful thought.
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Thought from which no emotion springs is sterile. The knowledge that has no bearing on the conduct of life is vain.
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It is not difficult to grasp and express thoughts that float on the stream of current opinion: but to think and rightly utter what is permanently true and interesting, what shall appeal to the best minds a thousand years hence, as it appeals to them to-day,-this is the work of genius.
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To secure approval one must remain within the bounds of conventional mediocrity. Whatever lies beyond, whether it be greater insight and virtue, or greater stolidity and vice, is condemned. The noblest men, like the worst criminals, have been done to death.
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There are faults which show heart and win hearts, while the virtue in which there is no love, repels.
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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.
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It is unpleasant to turn back, though it be to take the right way.
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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.
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He who leaves school, knowing little, but with a longing for knowledge, will go farther than one who quits, knowing many things, but not caring to learn more.
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The narrow-minded and petty sticklers for the formalities which hedge rank and office are the true vulgarians, however observant they be of etiquette.
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Agitators and declaimers may heat the blood, but they do not illumine the mind.
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Beauty lies not in the things we see, but in the soul.
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We have no sympathy with those who are controlled by ideas and passions which we neither understand nor feel. Thus they who live to satisfy the appetites do not believe it possible to live in and for the soul.