Frases de John Lancaster Spalding

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“Assim como a memória pode ser um paraíso do qual não podemos ser levados, ela pode também ser um infermo do qual não conseguimos escapar.”

“We may outgrow the things of children, without acquiring sense and relish for those which become a man.”

“The lover of education labors first of all to educate himself.”

“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.”

“Education would be a divine thing, if it did nothing more than help us to think and love great thoughts instead of little thoughts.”

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

“The genius is childlike. Like children he looks into the world as into a new creation and finds there a perennial source of wonder and delight.”

“The common man is impelled and controlled by interests; the superior, by ideas.”

“Exercise of body and exercise of mind are supplementary, and both may be made recreative and educative.”

“A great man, who lives intimately with his admirers, with difficulty escapes being made ridiculous.”

“We truly know only what we have taught ourselves.”

“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.”

“If thou wouldst be interesting, keep thy personality in the background, and be great and strong in and through thy subject.”

“The fields and the flowers and the beautiful faces are not ours, as the stars and the hills and the sunlight are not ours, but they give us fresh and happy thoughts.|”

“Philosophers and theologians, like the vulgar, prefer contradiction to enlightenment. They refute one another more gladly than they learn from one another, as though man lived by shunning error and not by loving truth. Accept their formulas and they sink back into their easy chairs and comfortably doze.”

“Love finds us young and keeps us so: immortal himself, he permits not age to enter the hearts where he reigns.”

“It is unpleasant to turn back, though it be to take the right way.”

“To love the perfection with which we do our work, or the company of those with whom we work, is the secret of learning to love the work itself.”

“Place before thyself the ideal of perfection, not that of happiness, for by doing what makes thee wiser and better, thou shalt find the peace and joy in which happiness consists.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

“More inspiring and interesting teaching alone can make progress in education possible: for such teaching alone has power to produce greater self-activity, greater concentration of mind, greater desire to learn not only how to get a living, but how to live.”

“The world is a mirror into which we look, and see our own image.”

“If the young are watched too closely, if they are kept habitually under surveillance, the spring of action is weakened, the power of initiative is destroyed, and they become mediocre, commonplace, mechanical men and women, from whom nothing excellent or distinguished may be expected. Parents and teachers … must so deal with the young as to bring them little by little under the control of reason and conscience; and in this, nothing thwarts more surely than excessive supervision, for it draws attention from the inner view and voice to the eyes of the watchers. It may cultivate a love of decency and propriety, but not the creative feeling that we live with God and that righteousness is life.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”