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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.

John Lancaster Spalding

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John Lancaster Spalding
Age: 76 †
Born: 1840
Born: June 2
Died: 1916
Died: August 25
Author
Biographer
Catholic Priest
Lebanon
Kentucky
Careful
Would
Science
Highest
Love
Facts
Value
Verification
Order
Indispensable
Best
Teaching
Statement
Nothing
Values
Accurate
Need
Simple
Statements
Mean
Fact
Observation
Needs
Means

More quotes by John Lancaster Spalding

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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
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In education, as in religion and love, compulsion thwarts the purpose for which it is employed.
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The innocence which is simply ignorance is not virtue.
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To secure approval one must remain within the bounds of conventional mediocrity. Whatever lies beyond, whether it be greater insight and virtue, or greater stolidity and vice, is condemned. The noblest men, like the worst criminals, have been done to death.
John Lancaster Spalding
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Dislike of another's opinions and beliefs neither justifies our own nor makes us more certain of them: and to transfer the repugnance to the person himself is a mark of a vulgar mind.
John Lancaster Spalding
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The first requisite of a gentleman is to be true, brave and noble, and to be therefore a rebuke and scandal to venal and vulgar souls.
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The ploughman knows how many acres he shall upturn from dawn to sunset: but the thinker knows not what a day may bring forth.
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If thou wouldst be interesting, keep thy personality in the background, and be great and strong in and through thy subject.
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We are not masters of the truth which is borne in upon us: it overpowers us.
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Though what we accept be true, it is a prejudice unless we ourselves have considered and understood why and how it is true.
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Exercise of body and exercise of mind are supplementary, and both may be made recreative and educative.
John Lancaster Spalding
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Inferior thinking and writing will make a name for a man among inferior people, who in all ages and countries, are the majority.
John Lancaster Spalding
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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.
John Lancaster Spalding
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The lover of education labors first of all to educate himself.
John Lancaster Spalding
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The noblest are they who turning from the things the vulgar crave, seek the source of a blessed life in worlds to which the senses do not lead.
John Lancaster Spalding
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The doubt of an earnest, thoughtful, patient and laborious mind is worthy of respect. In such doubt may be found indeed more faith than in half the creeds.
John Lancaster Spalding
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It is the expensiveness of our pleasures that makes the world poor and keeps us poor in ourselves. If we could but learn to find enjoyment in the things of the mind, the economic problems would solve themselves.
John Lancaster Spalding
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They who can no longer unlearn have lost the power to learn.
John Lancaster Spalding
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The writers who accomplish most are those who compel thought on the highest and most profoundly interesting subjects.
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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