John Lancaster Spalding on Life

"If ancient descent could confer nobility, the lower forms of life would possess it in a greater degree than man."

"Believe in no triumph which is won by the deadening of human faculty or the dwarfing of human life. Strive for truth and love, not for victory."

"Each individual bears within himself an ideal man, and to bring him forth in perfect form is his divinely imposed life-work."

"The pessimist writes over the gates of life what the poet has inscribed on the portals of hell—”Abandon hope, ye who enter here."

"When we have attained success, we see how inferior it is to the hope, yearning and enthusiasm with which we started forth in life’s morning."

"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."

"The doctrine of the utter vanity of life is a doctrine of despair, and life is hope."

"Obedience is not servility. On the contrary the servile are never rightly obedient."

"We are not masters of the truth which is borne in upon us: it overpowers us."

"The zest of life lies in right doing, not in the garnered harvest."

"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."

"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."

"The best book is but the record of the best life."

"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."

"Base thy life on principle, not on rules."

"We neglect the opportunities which are always present, and imagine that if those that are rare were offered, we should put them to good use. Thus we waste life waiting for what if it came we should be unprepared for."

"Drunkards and sensualists have become heroes and saints; but sluggards have never risen to the significance and worth of human beings. Sloth enfeebles the root of life, and degrades more surely, if less swiftly, than the sins of passion."

"The study of science, dissociated from that of philosophy and literature, narrows the mind and weakens the power to love and follow the noblest ideals: for the truths which science ignores and must ignore are precisely those which have the deepest bearing on life and conduct."

"As the savages whom we have instructed are ready when left to themselves to return to their ancestral mode of life, so our young people quickly forget what they have learned at school, and sink back into the commonplace existence from which a right education would have saved them."