J.G. Holland Quotes

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.

It is the life in literature that acts upon life.

I count this thing to be grandly true: That a noble deed is a step toward God
Lifting the soul from the common clod To a purer air and a broader view.

The fact is that sin is the most unmanly thing in God's world. You never were made for sin and selfishness. You were made for love and obedience.

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

The moment we recognize God as supreme in power and infinitely good and loving toward all His intelligent creatures, that moment we admit the doctrine of universal and special providence.

The faculties of our souls differ as widely as the features of our faces and the forms of our frames.

The hammer and the anvil are the two hemispheres of every true reformer's character.

Humanity is constitutionally lazy.

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

In my judgment, a great mistake has been made by well meaning and zealous men, through treating error and infidelity with altogether too much respect.

I softly sink into the bath of sleep: With eyelids shut, I see around me close The mottled, violet vapors of the deep, That wraps me in repose.

If we will measure other people's corn in our own bushel, let us first take it to the Divine standard, and have it sealed.

God gave every man individuality of constitution, and a chance for achieving individuality of character. He puts special instruments into every man's hands by which to make himself and achieve his mission.

Wealth is the least trustworthy of anchors.

A man may carry the whole scheme of Christian truth in his mind from boyhood to old age without the slightest effect upon his character and aims. It has had less influence than the multiplication table.

The idle man stands outside of God's plan, outside of the ordained scheme of things; and the truest self-respect, the noblest independence, and the most genuine dignity, are not to be found there.

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.

Posts of honor are evermore posts of danger and of care.

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.

Whatever of true glory has been won by any nation of the earth; whatever great advance his been made by any nation in that which constitutes a high Christian civilization, has been always at the cost of sacrifice; has cost the price marked upon it in God's inventory of national good.

Work for immortality if you will: then wait for it.

Man's record upon this wild world is the record of work, and of work alone.

Communion is the law of growth, and homes only thrive when they sustain relations with each other.

God pity the man of science who believes in nothing but what he can prove by scientific methods; for if ever a human being needed divine pity, he does.

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

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

Calmness is the cradle of power.

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.

This world of sense, built by the imagination
how fair and foul it is! Like a fairy island in the sea of life, it smiles in sunlight and sleeps in green, known of the world not by communion of knowledge, but by personal, secret discovery!

What do you think God gave you more wealth than is requisite to satisfy your rational wants for, when you look around and see how many are in absolute need of that which you do not need? Can you not take the hint?

Play may not have so high a place in the divine economy, but is has as legitimate a place as prayer.

A man does not necessarily sin who does that which our reason and our conscience condemn.

So I take my life as I find it, as a life full of grand advantages that are linked indissolubly to my noblest happiness and my everlasting safety. I believe that Infinite Love ordained it, and that, if I bow willingly, tractably, and gladly to its discipline, my Father will take care of it.

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

Music is a thing of the soul-a roselipped shell that murmured of the eternal sea-a strange bird singing the songs of another shore.

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

My idea of the Christian religion is, that it is an inspiration and its vital consequences
an inspiration and a life
God's life breathed into a man and breathed through a man
the highest inspiration and the highest life of every soul which it inhabits; and, furthermore, that the soul which it inhabits can have no high issue which is not essentially religious.

If have got my spindle and my distaff ready
my pen and mind
never doubting for an instant that God will send me flax.

Why will you be always sallying out to break lances with other people's wind-mills, when your own is not capable of grinding corn for the horse you ride?

It is by work that man carves his way to that measure of power which will fit him for his destiny.

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.

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

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.

God be thanked that there are some in the world to whose hearts the barnacles will not cling.

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.

In the homes of America are born the children of America; and from them go out into American life, American men and women. They go out with the stamp of these homes upon them; and only as these homes are what they should be, will they be what they should be.

We often wonder that certain men and women are left by God to the commission of sins that shock us. We wonder how, under the temptation of a single hour, they fall from the very heights of virtue and of honor into sin and shame. The fact is that there are no such falls as these, or there are next to none. These men and women are those who have dallied with temptation
have exposed themselves to the influence of it, and have been weakened and corrupted by it.

There is a contemptibly quiet path for all those who are afraid of the blows and clamor of opposing forces. There is no honorable fighting for a man who is not ready to forget that he has a head to be battered and a name to be bespattered. Truth wants no champion who is not as ready to be struck as to strike for her.

The temple of art is built of words. Painting and sculpture and music are but the blazon of its windows, borrowing all their significance from the light, and suggestive only of the temple's uses.

Fiction is most powerful when it contains most truth; and there is little truth we get so true as that which we find in fiction.

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

I stand by my kind; and I thank God for the temptations that have brought me into sympathy with them, as I do for the love that urges me to efforts for their good. I hail the great brotherhood of trial and temptation in the name of humanity, and give them assurance that from the Divine Man, and some, at least, of His disciples, there goes out to them a flood of sympathy that would fain sweep them up to the firm footing of the rock of safety.

There is no truth which personal vice will not distort.

Ah! soul of mine! Ah! soul of mine! Thy sluggish senses are but bars That stand between thee and the stars, And shut thee from the world divine.

Laws are the very bulkwarks of liberty; they define every man's rights, and defend the individual liberties of all men.

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

No genuine observer can decide otherwise than that the homes of a nation are the bulwarks of personal and national safety and thrift.

Work was made for man, and not man for work. Work is man's servant, both in its results to the worker and the world. Man is not work's servant, save as an almost universal perversion has made him such.

A noble deed is a step towards heaven.

Patience, persistence, and power to do are only acquired by work.

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

Life always take on the character of its motive.

If you want learning, you must work for it.

I know of but one garment which the fashionable social life of this country borrows of Christianity; it is that ample garment of charity which covers a multitude of sins
particularly fashionable sins.

We work and that is godlike.

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

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.

Assertion of truths known and felt, promulgation of truth from the high platform of truth itself, declaration of faith by the mouth of moral conviction
this is the New Testament method, and the true one.

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.

Every man who can be a first-rate something
as every man can be who is a man at all
has no right to be a fifth-rate something; for a fifth-rate something is not better than a first-rate nothing.

There is no point where art so nearly touches nature as when it appears in the form of words.

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.

Cost is the father and compensation the mother of progress.

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

All who become men of power reach their estate by the same self-mastery, the same self-adjustment to circumstances, the same voluntary exercise and discipline of their faculties, and the same working of their life up to and into their high ideals of life.

Heaven is not reached at a single bound. But we build the ladder by which we rise. From the lowly earth to the vaulted skies, And we mount to its summit round by round.

All that has been done to weaken the foundation of an implicit faith in the Bible, as a whole, has been at the expense of the sense of religious obligation, and at the cost of human happiness.

Scholarship, save by accident, is never the measure of a man's power.

A nation is a thing that lives and acts like a man and men are the particles of which it is composed.

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.

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

Geology gives us a key to the patience of God.

The love that gushes for all is the real elixir of life - the fountain of bodily longevity. It is the lack of this that always produces the feeling of age.

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

Play is a sacred thing, a divine ordinance, for developing in the child a harmonious and healthy organism, and preparing that organism for the commencement of the work of life.

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

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.

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.