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.

When guests enter the room their entertainers rise to receive them; and in all meetings men should ascend into their higher selves, imparting to one another only the best they know and love.

Beauty lies not in the things we see, but in the soul.

No occupation is more tiresome or depressing than that of killing time. It is the cause of lifeweariness, the punishment the soul inflicts upon itself when reduced to passiveness and servitude.

If thou wouldst be interesting, keep thy personality in the background, and be great and strong in and through thy subject.

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.

Break not the will of the young, but guide it to right ends.

If science were nothing more than the best means of teaching the love of the simple fact, the indispensable need of verification, of careful and accurate observation and statement, its value would be of the highest order.

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.

The able have no desire to appear to be so, and this is part of their ability.

They who admire and reverence noble and heroic men are akin to them.

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.

Houses and fields in which we lived and played in childhood and youth with those we loved, grow to be part of our being. The sight of them in later years touches us with mystic charm. It is like a vision from beyond the tomb or a memory of a lost Paradise. But little by little their power over us grows less and the light that falls on them becomes more like the common day. Their sacredness diminishes, their beauty fades. The young birds have flown, the old are dead, the leaves and blossoms have fallen and but the empty nest is left among the naked boughs; and looking on the desolation we feel that we have no abiding place on earth, since the home itself loses its consecration.

The ploughman knows how many acres he shall upturn from dawn to sunset: but the thinker knows not what a day may bring forth.

Whom little things occupy and keep busy, are little men.