John Lancaster Spalding (1840 – 1916)
First bishop of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Peoria from 1877 to 1908, a notable scholarly writer of the time and, a co-founder of The Catholic University of America.
If we are disappointed that men give little heed to what we utter is it for their sake or our own?
In education, as in religion and love, compulsion thwarts the purpose for which it is employed.
There is some lack either of sense or of character in one who becomes involved in difficulties with the worthless or the vicious.
States of soul rightly expressed, as the poet expresses them in moments of pure inspiration, retain forever the power of creating like states. It is this that makes genuine literature a vital force.
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.
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.
The happiness of the ignorant is but an animal’s paradise.
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.
They who truly know have had to unlearn hardly less than they have had to learn.
What matter that the man stands for much I cannot love—the moment he touches the realms of truth he enters my world and is my friend.
It is a common error to imagine that to be stirring and voluble in a worthy cause is to be good and to do good.
The important thing is how we know, not what or how much.
Be content that others have position, if thou hast ability: that others have riches, if thou hast virtue.
We do not see rightly until we learn to eliminate what we expect or wish to see from what we really see.
Whom little things occupy and keep busy, are little men.
When the mind has grasped the matter, words come like flowers at the call of spring.