J. G. Holland Quotes - Page 3

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.

Wants keep pace with wealth always.

There are no twin souls in God's universe.

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

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.

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

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.

Geology gives us a key to the patience of God.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

Humanity is constitutionally lazy.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

It is only rogues who feel the restraints of law.

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.