John Lancaster Spalding Quotes
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They who think they know all, learn nothing.
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What matter that the man stands for much I cannot love-the moment he touches the realms of truth he enters my world and is my friend.
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The happiness of the ignorant is but an animal’s paradise.
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Not to be able to utter one’s thought without giving offence, is to lack culture.
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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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We may outgrow the things of children, without acquiring sense and relish for those which become a man.
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We are more disturbed by a calamity which threatens us than by one which has befallen us.
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If thy friends tire of thee, remember that it is human to tire of everything.
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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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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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It is unpleasant to turn back, though it be to take the right way.
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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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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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There are faults which show heart and win hearts, while the virtue in which there is no love, repels.
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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.
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Agitators and declaimers may heat the blood, but they do not illumine the mind.
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The best money can procure for thee is freedom to live in thy true self. It is more apt however to enslave than to liberate. It is good also when thou makest it a means to help thy fellow men; but here too it is easier to harm than to benefit: for the money thou givest another is useful to him only when it stimulates him to self-activity.
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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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If a state should pass laws forbidding its citizens to become wise and holy, it would be made a byword for all time. But this, in effect, is what our commercial, social, and political systems do. They compel the sacrifice of mental and moral power to money and dissipation.
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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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The world is a mirror into which we look, and see our own image.
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Beauty lies not in the things we see, but in the soul.
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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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Taste, of which the proverb says there should be no dispute, is precisely the subject which needs discussion.