John Lancaster Spalding Quotes
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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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What purifies the heart refines language.
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The best book is but the record of the best life.
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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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Passion is begotten of passion, and it easily happens, as with the children of great men, that the base is the offspring of the noble.
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Exercise of body and exercise of mind are supplementary, and both may be made recreative and educative.
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How is it possible not to strive to know what the awakening minds of the young are eager to learn from us? It is little less than criminal that we should put them off with foolish speech or lies.
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As we can not love what is hateful, let us accustom ourselves neither to think nor to speak of disagreeable things and persons.
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The value of a mind is measured by the nature of the objects it habitually contemplates. They whose thoughts are of trifles are trifling: they who dwell with what is eternally true, good and fair, are like unto God.
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If we fail to interest, whether because we are dull and heavy, or because our hearers are so, we teach in vain.
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Obedience is not servility. On the contrary the servile are never rightly obedient.
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As memory may be a paradise from which we cannot be driven, it may also be a hell from which we cannot escape.
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They who see through the eyes of others are controlled by the will of others.
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It is a large part of learning to know what one wants, and where it may be found in its most authentic form.
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If thou wouldst be implacable, be so with thyself.
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Moral education is the development of individuality, and individuality can not be developed by formulas and mechanical processes: it is the work of the master who brings to his task a genuine and loving interest in the individual.
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The able have no desire to appear to be so, and this is part of their ability.
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To love the perfection with which we do our work, or the company of those with whom we work, is the secret of learning to love the work itself.
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We shrink from the contemplation of our dead bodies, forgetting that when dead they are no longer ours, and concern us as little as the hairs that have fallen from our heads.
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Nothing requires so little mental effort as to narrate or follow a story. Hence everybody tells stories and the readers of stories outnumber all others.
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The important thing is how we know, not what or how much.
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When we have not the strength or the courage to grasp a new truth, we persuade ourselves that it is not a truth at all.
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Beauty least adorned is most adorned
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A great man, who lives intimately with his admirers, with difficulty escapes being made ridiculous.