John Lancaster Spalding Quotes
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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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If truth make us not truthful, what service can it render us?
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Faith, like love, unites; opinion, like hate, separates.
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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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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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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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Taste, of which the proverb says there should be no dispute, is precisely the subject which needs discussion.
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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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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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What we think out for ourselves forms channels in which other thoughts will flow.
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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.
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The power of free will is developed and confirmed by increasing the number of worthy motives which influence conduct.
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We are not masters of the truth which is borne in upon us: it overpowers us.
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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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As the savages whom we have instructed are ready when left to themselves to return to their ancestral mode of life, so our young people quickly forget what they have learned at school, and sink back into the commonplace existence from which a right education would have saved them.
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Where it is the chief aim to teach many things, little education is given or received.
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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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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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The seeking for truth is better than its loveless possession.
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What we enjoy, not what we possess, is ours, and in labouring for the possession of many things, we lose the power to enjoy the best.
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To clothe truth in fitting words is to feel a satisfaction like that which comes of doing good deeds.
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Be content that others have position, if thou hast ability: that others have riches, if thou hast virtue.
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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.