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“Friends humor and flatter us, they steal our time, they encourage our love of ease, they make us content with ourselves, they are the foes of our virtue and our glory.”

John Lancaster Spalding

Source: Aphorisms and Reflections (1901), p. 22

“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.”

John Lancaster Spalding

Source: Aphorisms and Reflections (1901), p. 230

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

John Lancaster Spalding

Source: Aphorisms and Reflections (1901), p. 246

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

John Lancaster Spalding

Source: Aphorisms and Reflections (1901), p. 52

“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.”

John Lancaster Spalding

Source: Aphorisms and Reflections (1901), p. 226

“The world is a mirror into which we look, and see our own image.”

John Lancaster Spalding

Source: Aphorisms and Reflections (1901), p. 31

“If the young are watched too closely, if they are kept habitually under surveillance, the spring of action is weakened, the power of initiative is destroyed, and they become mediocre, commonplace, mechanical men and women, from whom nothing excellent or distinguished may be expected. Parents and teachers … must so deal with the young as to bring them little by little under the control of reason and conscience; and in this, nothing thwarts more surely than excessive supervision, for it draws attention from the inner view and voice to the eyes of the watchers. It may cultivate a love of decency and propriety, but not the creative feeling that we live with God and that righteousness is life.”

John Lancaster Spalding

Source: Aphorisms and Reflections (1901), p. 257-258

“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.”

John Lancaster Spalding

Source: Aphorisms and Reflections (1901), p. 62

“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.”

John Lancaster Spalding

Source: Aphorisms and Reflections (1901), pp. 239-240

“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.”

John Lancaster Spalding

Source: Aphorisms and Reflections (1901), p. 241

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

John Lancaster Spalding

Source: Aphorisms and Reflections (1901), p. 146

“No sooner does a divine gift reveal itself in youth or maid than its market value becomes the decisive consideration, and the poor young creatures are offered for sale, as we might sell angels who had strayed among us.”

John Lancaster Spalding

Source: Aphorisms and Reflections (1901), p. 21

“Agitators and declaimers may heat the blood, but they do not illumine the mind.”

John Lancaster Spalding

Source: Aphorisms and Reflections (1901), p. 261

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

John Lancaster Spalding

Source: Aphorisms and Reflections (1901), p. 44

“When the crowd acclaims its favorites it applauds itself.”

John Lancaster Spalding

Source: Aphorisms and Reflections (1901), p. 208

“It is held that one fulfils his whole duty when he is industrious in his business or vocation, observing also the decencies of domestic, civil, and religious life. But activity of this kind stirs only the surface of our being, leaving what is most divine to starve; and when it is made the one important thing, men lose sense for what is high and holy, and become commonplace, mechanical, and hard. Science is valuable for them as a means to comfort and wealth; morality, as an aid to success; religion, as an agent of social order. In their eyes those who devote themselves to ideal aims and ends are as foolish as the alchemists, since the only real world is that of business and politics, or of business simply, since politics is business.”

John Lancaster Spalding

Source: Aphorisms and Reflections (1901), p. 14

“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.”

John Lancaster Spalding

Source: Aphorisms and Reflections (1901), p. 72

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

John Lancaster Spalding

Source: Aphorisms and Reflections (1901), p. 64

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

John Lancaster Spalding

Source: Aphorisms and Reflections (1901), p. 244

“Folly will run its course and it is the part of wisdom not to take it too seriously.”

John Lancaster Spalding

Source: Aphorisms and Reflections (1901), p. 216