John Lancaster Spalding Quotes

The object of universities is not to make skillful lawyers, physicians or engineers. It is to make capable and cultivated human beings

Education can give you a skill, but a liberal education can give you dignity.

Education made us what we are.

Education is the development of power and ideal.

An education is not so much about making a living as making a person.

the idea of a finished human product not only appears presumptuous but even, in my opinion, lacks any strong appeal. Life is struggle and striving, development and growth - and analysis is one of the means that can help in this process. Certainly its positive accomplishments are important, but also the striving itself is of intrinsic value.

Each generation is inclined to educate its young so as to get along in the present world instead of with a view to the proper end of education: the promotion of the best possible realization of humanity as humanity. Parents educate their children so that they may get on; princes educate their subjects as instruments of their own purpose.

A university is not, primarily, a place in which to learn how to make a living; it is a place in which to learn how to be more fully a human being, how to draw upon one's resources, how to discipline the mind and expand the imagination; how to make some sense out of the big world we will shortly be thrown into.

If education is to develop human nature so that it may attain the object of its being, it must involve the exercise of judgment.

We should read other people's books in order to learn what we feel; it is our own thoughts we should be developing, even if it is another writer's thought that help us to do so.

My subject is the educated imagination, and education is something that affects the whole person, not bits and pieces of him .

How then is perfection to be sought? Wherein lies our hope? In education, and in nothing else.

Here's the thing - if you stop learning, you might as well pack it in. You can't learn anything with your mouth open.

The best way to help a man increase his output is to help build the man. Help him increase his stature as a man, and he will just naturally do better-on the job and off.

Education is not a product: mark, diploma, job, money-in that order; it is a process, a never-ending one.

Concepts vs. self-actualization. - Instead of dedicating your life to actualize a concept of what you should be like, ACTUALIZE YOURSELF. The process of maturing does not mean to become a captive of conceptualization. It is to come to the realization of what lies in our innermost selves.

The philosopher spends in becoming a man the time which the ambitious man spends in becoming a personage.

But the ground of a man's culture lies in his nature, not in his calling. His powers are to be unfolded on account of their inherent dignity, not their outward direction. He is to be educated, because he is a man, not because he is to make shoes, nail, or pins.

If a man does not have an ideal and try to live up to it, then he becomes a mean, base and sordid creature, no matter how successful.

Education is the leading human souls to what is best, and making what is best out of them; and these two objects are always attainable together, and by the same means; the training which makes man happiest in themselves also makes them most serviceable to others.

Education is the great engine to personal development.

It is wonderful what a difference learning makes upon people even in the common intercourse of life, which does not appear to be much connected with it.

There is one further distinguishing characteristic of man which is very specific indeed and about which there can be no dispute, and that is the faculty of self-improvement - a faculty which, with the help of circumstance, progressively develops all our other faculties.

What is the task of higher education? To make a man into a machine. What are the means employed? He is taught how to suffer being bored.

As an apple is not in any proper sense an apple until it is ripe, so a human being is not in any proper sense a human being until he is educated.