Top 137 Quotes & Sayings by J. G. Holland

A man who feels that his religion is a slavery has not begun to comprehend the real nature of religion.

Gossip is always a personal confession either of malice or imbecility.

God gives every bird its food, but He does not throw it into the nest. He does not unearth the good that the earth contains, but He puts it in our way, and gives us the means of getting it ourselves.

Gossip is always a personal confession either of malice or imbecility, and the young should not only shun it, but by the most thorough culture relieve themselves from all temptation to indulge in it. It is a low, frivolous, and too often a dirty business. There are country neighborhoods in which it rages like a pest. Churches are split in pieces by it. Neighbors are made enemies by it for life. In many persons it degenerates into a chronic disease, which is practically incurable. Let the young cure it while they may.

God give us men. The time demands strong minds, great hearts, true faith and willing hands.

Character lives in a man, reputation outside of him.

Cost is the father and compensation the mother of progress.

He never said it would be easy, He just said He'd go with me.

There are no twin souls in God's universe.

It is better to be a self-made man,--filled up according to God's original pattern,--than to be half a man, made after some other man's pattern.

Life always take on the character of its motive.

If there be one attribute of the Deity which astonishes me more than another, it is the attribute of patience. The Great Soul that sits on the throne of the universe is not, never was, and never will be, in a hurry. In the realm of nature, every thing has been wrought out in the august consciousness of infinite leisure; and I bless God for that geology which gives me a key to the patience in which the creative process was effected.

Of all the scamps society knows, the traditional good fellow is the most despicable.

A fortune won in a day is lost in a day; a fortune won slowly, and slowly compacted, seems to acquire from the hand that won it the property of endurance.

The gentleman is solid mahogany; the fashionable man is only veneer.

A noble deed is a step towards heaven.

Fashion is not public opinion, or the result of embodiment of public opinion. It may be that public opinion will condemn the shape of a bonnet, as it may venture to do always, and with the certainty of being right nine times in ten: but fashion will place it upon the head of every woman in America; and, were it literally a crown of thorns, she would smile contentedly beneath the imposition.

Nothing so obstinately stands in the way of all sorts of progress as pride of opinion. While nothing is so foolish and baseless.

Labor is the instituted means for the methodical development of all our powers under the direction and control of the will.

Work and wait, work and wait is what God says to us in creation.

Perfect love holds the secret of the world's perfect liberty.

Humanity is constitutionally lazy.

Doubtless the world is wicked enough; but it will not be improved by the extension of a spirit which self-righteously sees more to reform outside of itself than in itself.

The secret of being loved is in being lovely; and the secret of being lovely is in being unselfish.

A fit of anger is as fatal to dignity as a dose of arsenic is to life.

The moment that law is destroyed, liberty is lost, and men, left free to enter upon the domains of each other, destroy each other's rights, and invade the field of each other's liberty.

The sweetest type of heaven is home - nay, heaven is the home for whose acquisition we are to strive the most strongly. Home, in one form and another, is the great object of life. It stands at the end of every day's labor, and beckons us to its bosom; an life would be cheerless and meaningless, did we not discern across the river that divides us from the life beyond, glimpses of the pleasant mansions prepared for us.

There is no great achievement that is not the result of patient working and waiting.

The cry of the soul is for freedom. It longs for liberty, from the date of its first conscious moments.

Almost everywhere men have become the particular things which their particular work has made them.

The secret of man's success resides in his insight into the moods of people, and his tact in dealing with them.

Childhood may do without a grand purpose, but manhood cannot.

God give us men! A time like this demands. Strong minds, great hearts, true faith, and ready hands; Men whom the lust of office does not kill; Men whom the spoils of office cannot buy; Men who possess opinions and a will; Men who have honor; men who will not die.

Every man who strikes blows for power, for influence, for institutions, for the right, must be just as good an anvil as he is a hammer.

A woman in love is a very poor judge of character.

No man ever feels the restraint of law so long as he remains within the sphere of his liberty -- a sphere, by the way, always large enough for the full exercise of his powers and the supply of all his legitimate wants.

Life is before you,- not earthly life alone, but life- a thread running interminably through the warp of eternity.

The theological systems of men and schools of men are determined always by the character of their ideal of Christ, the central fact of the Christian system.

There is no well-doing, no Godlike doing, that is not patient doing.

No nation can be destroyed while it possesses a good home life.

Music was a thing of the soul — a rose-lipped shell that murmured of the eternal sea — a strange bird singing the songs of another shore.

And when, in the evening of life, the golden clouds rest sweetly and invitingly upon the golden mountains, and the light of heaven streams down through the gathering mists of death, I wish you a peaceful and abundant entrance into that world of blessedness, where the great riddle of life will be unfolded to you in the quick consciousness of a soul redeemed and purified.

Life was intended to be so adjusted that the body should be the servant of the soul, and always subordinate to the soul.

Blessed is that man who knows his own distaff and has found his own spindle.

A young man rarely gets a better vision of himself than that which is reflected from a true woman's eyes; for God himself sits behind them.

Artists are nearest God. Into their souls he breathes his life, and from their hands it comes in fair, articulate forms to bless the world.

Every man's powers have relation to some kind of work; and whenever he finds that kind of work which he can do best--that to which his powers are best adapted--he finds that which will give him the best development, and that by which he can best build up, or make, his manhood.

Everything good in a man thrives best when properly recognized.

Wants keep pace with wealth always.

The most beautiful sight this earth affords is a man or woman so filled with love that duty is only a name, and its performance the natural outflow and expression of the love which has become the central principle of their life.

It is not a question how much a man knows, but what use he can make of what he knows.

Who never walks save where he sees men's tracks makes no discoveries.

How long must the church live before it will learn that strength is won by action, and success by work, and that all this immeasurable feeding without action and work is a positive damage to it--that it is the procurer of spiritual obesity, gout, and debility.

Of all the advantages which come to any young man ... poverty is the greatest.

Poet, forger of ideals, dreamer among the possibilities of life, prophet of the millenium, do you get impatient with the prosaic life around you -- the dulness, and the earthliness, and the brutishness of men? Fret not. Go forward into the realm which stretches before you; climb the highest mountain you can reach, and plant a cross there. The nations will come up to it some day. Work for immortality if you will; then wait for it. If your own age fail to recognize you, a coming age will not.

The most precious possession that ever comes to a man in this world is a woman's heart.

That which grows fast, withers as rapidly. That which grows slow, endures.

Geology gives us a key to the patience of God.

Idleness is the sepulchre of a living man.

There are crowds who trample a flower into the dust without thinking once that they have one of the sweetest thoughts of God under their heel.