John Lancaster Spalding Quotes

A liberal education is that which aims to develop faculty without ulterior views of profession or other means of gaining a livelihood. It considers man an end in himself and not an instrument whereby something is to be wrought. Its ideal is human perfection.

One may speak Latin and have but the mind of a peasant.

Inferior thinking and writing will make a name for a man among inferior people, who in all ages and countries, are the majority.

What a wise man knows seems so plain and simple to himself that he easily makes the mistake of thinking it to be so for others.

In education, as in religion and love, compulsion thwarts the purpose for which it is employed.

Where it is the chief aim to teach many things, little education is given or received.

The aim of education is to strengthen and multiply the powers and activities of the mind rather than to increase its possessions.

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.

To think profoundly, to seek and speak truth, to love justice and denounce wrong is to draw upon one’s self the ill will of many.

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 test of the worth of a school is not the amount of knowledge it imparts, but the self-activity it calls forth.

As a brave man goes into fire or flood or pestilence to save a human life, so a generous mind follows after truth and love, and is not frightened from the pursuit by danger or toil or obloquy.

There is some lack either of sense or of character in one who becomes involved in difficulties with the worthless or the vicious.

More inspiring and interesting teaching alone can make progress in education possible: for such teaching alone has power to produce greater self-activity, greater concentration of mind, greater desire to learn not only how to get a living, but how to live.

Each individual bears within himself an ideal man, and to bring him forth in perfect form is his divinely imposed life-work.