Top 120 John Lancaster Spalding Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “They who can no longer unlearn have lost the power to learn.”

— John Lancaster Spalding

2. “Your faith is what you believe, not what you know.”

— John Lancaster Spalding

3. “As memory may be a paradise from which we cannot be driven, it may also be a hell from which we cannot escape.”

— John Lancaster Spalding

4. “The highest courage is to dare to appear to be what one is.”

— John Lancaster Spalding

5. “Each forward step we take we leave some phantom of ourselves behind.”

— John Lancaster Spalding

6. “Those who believe in our ability do more than stimulate us. They create for us an atmosphere in which it becomes easier to succeed.”

— John Lancaster Spalding

7. “The innocence which is simply ignorance is not virtue.”

— John Lancaster Spalding

8. “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

9. “A hobby is the result of a distorted view of things. It is putting a planet in the place of a sun.”

— John Lancaster Spalding

10. “Whoever has freed himself from envy and bitterness may begin to try to see things as they are.”

— John Lancaster Spalding

11. “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

12. “Leave each one his touch of folly; it helps to lighten life’s burden which, if he could see himself as he is, might be too heavy to carry.”

— John Lancaster Spalding

13. “What we love to do we find time to do.”

— John Lancaster Spalding

14. “If I am not pleased with myself, but should wish to be other than I am, why should I think highly of the influences which have made me what I am?”

— John Lancaster Spalding

15. “Worry, whatever its source, weakens, takes away courage, and shortens life.”

— John Lancaster Spalding

16. “The common prejudice against philosophy is the result of the incapacity of the multitude to deal with the highest problems.”

— John Lancaster Spalding

17. “If thy words are wise, they will not seem so to the foolish: if they are deep the shallow will not appreciate them. Think not highly of thyself, then, when thou art praised by many.”

— John Lancaster Spalding

18. “When guests enter the room their entertainers rise to receive them; and in all meetings men should ascend into their higher selves, imparting to one another only the best they know and love.”

— John Lancaster Spalding

19. “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

20. “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

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

— John Lancaster Spalding

22. “In giving us dominion over the animal kingdom God has signified His will that we subdue the beast within ourselves.”

— John Lancaster Spalding

23. “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

24. “Our prejudices are like physical infirmities – we cannot do what they prevent us from doing.”

— John Lancaster Spalding

25. “Liberty is more precious than money or office; and we should be vigilant lest we purchase wealth or place at the price of inner freedom.”

— John Lancaster Spalding

26. “Solitude is unbearable for those who can not bear themselves.”

— John Lancaster Spalding

27. “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

28. “The highest strength is acquired not in overcoming the world, but in overcoming one’s self. Learn to be cruel to thyself, to withstand thy appetites, to bear thy sufferings, and thou shalt become free and able.”

— John Lancaster Spalding

29. “The important thing is how we know, not what or how much.”

— John Lancaster Spalding

30. “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

31. “The aim of education is to strengthen and multiply the powers and activities of the mind rather than to increase its possessions.”

— John Lancaster Spalding

32. “Women are aristocrats, and it is always the mother who makes us feel that we belong to the better sort.”

— John Lancaster Spalding

33. “The zest of life lies in right doing, not in the garnered harvest.”

— John Lancaster Spalding

34. “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

35. “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

36. “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

37. “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

38. “We are more disturbed by a calamity which threatens us than by one which has befallen us.”

— John Lancaster Spalding

39. “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

40. “Altruism is a barbarism. Love is the word.”

— John Lancaster Spalding

41. “There is some lack either of sense or of character in one who becomes involved in difficulties with the worthless or the vicious.”

— John Lancaster Spalding

42. “When one sense has been bribed the others readily bear false witness.”

— John Lancaster Spalding

43. “What we think out for ourselves forms channels in which other thoughts will flow.”

— John Lancaster Spalding

44. “There are who mistake the spirit of pugnacity for the spirit of piety, and thus harbor a devil instead of an angel.”

— John Lancaster Spalding

45. “What we enjoy, not what we possess, is ours, and in labouring for the possession of many things, we lose the power to enjoy the best.”

— John Lancaster Spalding

46. “Do definite good; first of all to yourself, then to definite persons.”

— John Lancaster Spalding

47. “The ploughman knows how many acres he shall upturn from dawn to sunset: but the thinker knows not what a day may bring forth.”

— John Lancaster Spalding

48. “What is greatly desired, but long deferred, gives little pleasure, when at length it is ours, for we have lived with it in imagination until we have grown weary of it, having ourselves, in the meanwhile, become other.”

— John Lancaster Spalding

49. “Nothing requires so little mental effort as to narrate or follow a story. Hence everybody tells stories and the readers of stories outnumber all others.”

— John Lancaster Spalding

50. “As children must have the hooping cough, the college youth must pass through the stage of conceit in which he holds in slight esteem the wisdom of the best.”

— John Lancaster Spalding