Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
If thou wouldst be interesting, keep thy personality in the background, and be great and strong in and through thy subject.
John Lancaster Spalding
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
John Lancaster Spalding
Age: 76 †
Born: 1840
Born: June 2
Died: 1916
Died: August 25
Author
Biographer
Catholic Priest
Lebanon
Kentucky
Great
Backgrounds
Thou
Subject
Personality
Subjects
Interesting
Strong
Wouldst
Keep
Background
More quotes by 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
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
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.
John Lancaster Spalding
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
The innocence which is simply ignorance is not virtue.
John Lancaster Spalding
The world is a mirror into which we look, and see our own image.
John Lancaster Spalding
Faith, like love, unites opinion, like hate, separates.
John Lancaster Spalding
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.
John Lancaster Spalding
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
Your faith is what you believe, not what you know.
John Lancaster Spalding
The writers who accomplish most are those who compel thought on the highest and most profoundly interesting subjects.
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
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.
John Lancaster Spalding
What we think out for ourselves forms channels in which other thoughts will flow.
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
If there are but few who interest thee, why shouldst thou be disappointed if but few find thee interesting?
John Lancaster Spalding
Insight makes argument ridiculous.
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
Each forward step we take we leave some phantom of ourselves behind.
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
