John Lancaster Spalding

"As the visit of one we love makes the whole day pleasant, so is it illumined and made fair by a brave and beautiful thought."

"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."

"Each one fashions and bears his world with him, and that unless he himself become wise, strong and loving, no change in his circumstances can make him rich or free or happy."

"If we attempt to sink the soul in matter, its light is quenched."

"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."

"In our thrifty populations of merchants, manufacturers, politicians, and professional men, there is little sense for beauty, little pure thought, little genuine culture; but they are prosperous and self-satisfied."

"True readers … are ready to go through a whole volume, if there be but hope of finding in it a single genuine thought or the mere suggestion even of a truth which has some fresh application to life."

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

"The strong man is he who knows how and is able to become and be himself; the magnanimous man is he who, being strong, knows how and is able to issue forth from himself, as from a fortress, to guide, protect, encourage, and save others."

"It is held that one fulfils his whole duty when he is industrious in his business or vocation, observing also the decencies of domestic, civil, and religious life. But activity of this kind stirs only the surface of our being, leaving what is most divine to starve; and when it is made the one important thing, men lose sense for what is high and holy, and become commonplace, mechanical, and hard. Science is valuable for them as a means to comfort and wealth; morality, as an aid to success; religion, as an agent of social order. In their eyes those who devote themselves to ideal aims and ends are as foolish as the alchemists, since the only real world is that of business and politics, or of business simply, since politics is business."

"We have lost the old love of work, of work which kept itself company, which was fair weather and music in the heart, which found its reward in the doing, craving neither the flattery of vulgar eyes nor the gold of vulgar men."