John Lancaster Spalding Quotes

Have as little suspicion as possible and conceal that.

Make thyself perfect; others, happy.

If thou wouldst be implacable, be so with thyself.

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.

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.

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

It is more profitable to be mindful of our own faults than of those of our age.

Faith, like love, unites; opinion, like hate, separates.

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.

O brave youth, how good for thee it were couldst thou be made to understand how infinitely precious are thy school years—years when thou hast leisure to grow, when new worlds break in upon thee, and thou fashionest thy being in the light of the ideals of truth and goodness and beauty! If now thou dost not fit thyself to become free and whole, thou shalt, when the doors of this fair mother-house of the mind, close behind thee, be driven into ways that lead to bondage, be compelled to do that which cripples and dwarfs; for the work whereby men gain a livelihood involves mental and moral mutilation, unless it be done in the spirit of religion and culture. Ah! well for thee, canst thou learn while yet there is time that it will profit thee nothing to become the possessor of millions, if the price thou payest is thy manhood.

If we attempt to sink the soul in matter, its light is quenched.

They who no longer believe in principles still proclaim them, to conceal, both from themselves and others, the selfishness of the motives by which they are dominated.

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

They who truly know have had to unlearn hardly less than they have had to learn.

Love finds us young and keeps us so: immortal himself, he permits not age to enter the hearts where he reigns.