J. g. holland quotes

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.

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.

All things unrevealed belong to the kingdom of mystery.

Responsibility walks hand in hand with capacity and power.

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

There is no royal road to anything. One thing at a time, all things in succession. That which grows fast, withers as rapidly. That which grows slowly, endures.

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.

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

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

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

The faculty of self-help is that which distinguished man from animals; that it is the Godlike element, or holds within itself the Godlike element, of his constitution.

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.

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.

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

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

A mind grows by what it feeds on.

Calmness is the cradle of power.

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

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.

It is only rogues who feel the restraints of law.

God gives every bird its food, but He does not throw it into its nest.

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.

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

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.

Cost is the father and compensation the mother of progress.

The temple of art is built in words.

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

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

I look into your great brown eyes, where love and loyal homage shine, and wonder where the difference lies between your soul and mine!.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

The soul, like the body, lives by what it feeds on.

We work and that is godlike.

Immortality--twin sister of Eternity.

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

He that cannot paint must grind the colors.

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.

To labor rightly and earnestly is to walk in the golden track that leads to God. It is to adopt the regimen of manhood and womanhood. It is to come into sympathy with the great struggle of humanity toward perfection. It is to adopt the fellowship of all the great and good the world has ever known.

We live in the future. Even the happiness of the present is made up mostly of that delightful discontent which the hope of better things inspires.

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.

Wealth is the least trustworthy of anchors.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Wants keep pace with wealth always.

Humanity is constitutionally lazy.

I have learned that to do one's next duty is to take a step toward all that is worth possessing.

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

It is the life in literature that acts upon life.

There is nothing more precious to a man than his will; there is nothing which he relinquishes with so much reluctance.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The man who loves home best, and loves it most unselfishly, loves his country best.

I account the office of benefactor, or almoner, to which God appoints all those whom he has favored with wealth, one of the most honorable and delightful in the world. He never institutes a channel for the passage of His bounties that those bounties do not enrich and beautify.

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

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.

A noble deed is a step towards heaven.

Geology gives us a key to the patience of God.

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 pleasant converse of the fireside, the simple songs of home, the words of encouragement as I bend over my school-tasks, the kiss as I lie down to rest, the patient bearing with the freaks of my restless nature, the gentle counsels mingled with reproofs and approvals, the sympathy that meets and assuages every sorrow, and sweetens every little success--all these return to me amid the responsibilities which press upon me now, and I feel as if I had once lived in heaven, and, straying, had lost my way.

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.

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.

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

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

What is the little one thinking about? Very wonderful things, no doubt; Unwritten history! Unfathomed mystery! Yet he laughs and cries, and eats and drinks, And chuckles and crows, and nods and winks, As if his head were as full of kinks And curious riddles as any sphinx!

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.

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.

Idleness is the sepulchre of a living man.

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

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.

A man who in the struggles of life has no home to retire to, in fact or in memory, is without life's best rewards and life's best defences.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Life always take on the character of its motive.

Character lives in a man, reputation outside of him.

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

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.

Joys divided are increased.

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

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.

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

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

Everything good in a man thrives best when properly recognized.

Preceptive wisdom that has not been vivified by life has in itself no affinity for life.

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.

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.

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

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

There are no twin souls in God's universe.

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

The person who does not know how to live while they are making a living is a poorer person after their wealth is won than when they started.

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

There is really nothing left to a genuine idle man, who possesses any considerable degree of vital power, but sin.

There is no truth which personal vice will not distort.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.