John Lancaster Spalding Quotes

Conversation injures more than it benefits. Men talk to escape from themselves, from sheer dread of silence. Reflection makes them uncomfortable, and they find distraction in a noise of words. They seek not the company of those who might enlighten and improve them, but that of whoever can divert and amuse them. Thus the intercourse which ought to be a chief means of education, is for the most part, the occasion of mental and moral enfeeblement.

As they are the bravest who require no witnesses to their deeds of daring, so they are the best who do right without thinking whether or not it shall be known.

We neglect the opportunities which are always present, and imagine that if those that are rare were offered, we should put them to good use. Thus we waste life waiting for what if it came we should be unprepared for.

Reform the world within thyself, which is thy proper world.

Great deeds and utterances are now so diluted with printer’s ink that we can no longer find a sage or saint. Our worthiest men are exhibited and bewritten until they are made as uninteresting as clowns.

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.

When pleasure is made a business, it ceases to be pleasure.

A principal aim of education is to give students a taste for literature, for the books of life and power, and to accomplish this, it is necessary that their minds be held aloof from the babblement and discussions of the hour, that they may accustom themselves to take interest in the words and deeds of the greatest men, and so make themselves able and worthy to shape a larger and nobler future; but if their hours of leisure are spent over journals and reviews, they will, in later years, become the helpless victims of the newspaper habit.

To how much lying, extravagance, hypocrisy and servilism does not the fear of ridicule lead? Human respect makes us cowards and slaves. It may deter from evil, but much oftener it drives to baseness. “We are too much afraid,” said Cato, “of death, exile and poverty.”

The zest of life lies in right doing, not in the garnered harvest.

They who think they know all, learn nothing.

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.

Agitators and declaimers may heat the blood, but they do not illumine the mind.

The innocence which is simply ignorance is not virtue.

True readers … are ready to go through a whole volume, if there be but hope of finding in it a single genuine thought or the mere suggestion even of a truth which has some fresh application to life.