John Lancaster Spalding Quotes

The more we live with what we imagine others think of us, the less we live with truth.

A hobby is the result of a distorted view of things. It is putting a planet in the place of a sun.

As children must have the hooping cough, the college youth must pass through the stage of conceit in which he holds in slight esteem the wisdom of the best.

We do not see rightly until we learn to eliminate what we expect or wish to see from what we really see.

Thought from which no emotion springs is sterile. The knowledge that has no bearing on the conduct of life is vain.

It is the business of the teacher … to fortify reason and to make conscience sovereign.

The study of science, dissociated from that of philosophy and literature, narrows the mind and weakens the power to love and follow the noblest ideals: for the truths which science ignores and must ignore are precisely those which have the deepest bearing on life and conduct.

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.

They whom trifles distract and nothing occupies are but children.

If we fail to interest, whether because we are dull and heavy, or because our hearers are so, we teach in vain.

To cultivate the memory we should confide to it only what we understand and love: the rest is a useless burden; for simply to know by rote is not to know at all.

We have no sympathy with those who are controlled by ideas and passions which we neither understand nor feel. Thus they who live to satisfy the appetites do not believe it possible to live in and for the soul.

Exercise of body and exercise of mind are supplementary, and both may be made recreative and educative.

We do not find it hard to bear with ourselves, though we are full of faults. Why then may we not learn to be tolerant of others?

Believe in no triumph which is won by the deadening of human faculty or the dwarfing of human life. Strive for truth and love, not for victory.