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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.
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
Simply
Rote
Understand
Confide
Love
Cultivate
Useless
Burden
Memory
Rest
Memories
More quotes by John Lancaster Spalding
Solitude is unbearable for those who can not bear themselves.
John Lancaster Spalding
It is difficult to be sure of our friends, but it is possible to be certain of our loyalty to them.
John Lancaster Spalding
The world is chiefly a mental fact. From mind it receives the forms of time and space, the principle of casuality[sic], color, warmth, and beauty. Were there no mind, there would be no world.
John Lancaster Spalding
The teacher does best, not when he explains, but when he impels his pupils to seek themselves the explanation.
John Lancaster Spalding
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
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
We are not masters of the truth which is borne in upon us: it overpowers us.
John Lancaster Spalding
Few know the joys that spring from a disinterested curiosity. It is like a cheerful spirit that leads us through worlds filled with what is true and fair, which we admire and love because it is true and fair.
John Lancaster Spalding
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
Altruism is a barbarism. Love is the word.
John Lancaster Spalding
Insight makes argument ridiculous.
John Lancaster Spalding
A Wise man knows that much of what he says and does is commonplace and trivial. His thoughts are not all solemn and sacred in his own eyes. He is able to laugh at himself and is not offended when others make him a subject whereon to exercise their wit.
John Lancaster Spalding
We may avoid much disappointment and bitterness of soul by learning to understand how little necessary to our joy and peace are the things the multitude most desire and seek.
John Lancaster Spalding
Faith, like love, unites opinion, like hate, separates.
John Lancaster Spalding
Your faith is what you believe, not what you know.
John Lancaster Spalding
The highest courage is to dare to appear to be what one is
John Lancaster Spalding
Education would be a divine thing, if it did nothing more than help us to think and love great thoughts instead of little thoughts.
John Lancaster Spalding
Be watchful lest thou lose the power of desiring and loving what appeals to the soul this is the miser's curse this the chain and ball the sensualist drags.
John Lancaster Spalding
If there were nothing else to trouble us, the fate of the flowers would make us sad.
John Lancaster Spalding
The study of law is valuable as a mental discipline, but the practice of pleading tends to make one petty, formal, and insincere. To be driven to look to legality rather than to equity blurs the view of truth and justice.
John Lancaster Spalding