John Lancaster Spalding Quotes

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.

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.

The common prejudice against philosophy is the result of the incapacity of the multitude to deal with the highest problems.

Education would be a divine thing, if it did nothing more than help us to think and love great thoughts instead of little thoughts.

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

The will—the one thing it is most important to educate—we neglect.

If ancient descent could confer nobility, the lower forms of life would possess it in a greater degree than man.

It is the business of culture to make us able to consider with intelligent interest all real opinions, even those we do not and can not accept.

The world is chiefly a mental fact. From mind it receives the forms of time and space, the principle of casuality[sic], color, warmth, and beauty. Were there no mind, there would be no world.

States of soul rightly expressed, as the poet expresses them in moments of pure inspiration, retain forever the power of creating like states. It is this that makes genuine literature a vital force.

They who think they know all, learn nothing.

The best book is but the record of the best life.

We may outgrow the things of children, without acquiring sense and relish for those which become a man.

The fields and the flowers and the beautiful faces are not ours, as the stars and the hills and the sunlight are not ours, but they give us fresh and happy thoughts.|

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.