John Lancaster Spalding Quotes
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If truth make us not truthful, what service can it render us?
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The highest strength is acquired not in overcoming the world, but in overcoming one’s self. Learn to be cruel to thyself, to withstand thy appetites, to bear thy sufferings, and thou shalt become free and able.
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If thou wouldst be interesting, keep thy personality in the background, and be great and strong in and through thy subject.
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In the world of thought a man’s rank is determined, not by his average work, but by his highest achievement.
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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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Agitators and declaimers may heat the blood, but they do not illumine the mind.
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Perfection is beyond our reach, but they who earnestly strive to become perfect, acquire excellences and virtues of which the multitude have no conception.
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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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The noblest are they who turning from the things the vulgar crave, seek the source of a blessed life in worlds to which the senses do not lead.
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Beauty lies not in the things we see, but in the soul.
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The seeking for truth is better than its loveless possession.
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Where it is the chief aim to teach many things, little education is given or received.
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The best book is but the record of the best life.
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What we think out for ourselves forms channels in which other thoughts will flow.
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We have lost the old love of work, of work which kept itself company, which was fair weather and music in the heart, which found its reward in the doing, craving neither the flattery of vulgar eyes nor the gold of vulgar men.
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If thy words are wise, they will not seem so to the foolish: if they are deep the shallow will not appreciate them. Think not highly of thyself, then, when thou art praised by many.
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We are not masters of the truth which is borne in upon us: it overpowers us.
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What purifies the heart refines language.
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The doctrine of the utter vanity of life is a doctrine of despair, and life is hope.
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The ploughman knows how many acres he shall upturn from dawn to sunset: but the thinker knows not what a day may bring forth.
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Since the mass of mankind are too ignorant or too indolent to think seriously, if majorities are right it is by accident.
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If thou need money, get it in an honest way-by keeping books, if thou wilt, but not by writing books.
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In our thrifty populations of merchants, manufacturers, politicians, and professional men, there is little sense for beauty, little pure thought, little genuine culture; but they are prosperous and self-satisfied.
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Faith, like love, unites; opinion, like hate, separates.