J. G. Holland quotes:

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

My God! I thank Thee for the bath of sleep, That wraps in balm my weary heart and brain, And drowns within its waters still and deep My sorrow and my pain. I thank Thee for my dreams, which loose the bond That binds my spirit to its daily load, And give it angel wings, to fly beyond Its slumber-bound abode.

Immortality--twin sister of Eternity.

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

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

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

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

Calmness is the cradle of power.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

Tuhan memberikan makanan kepada setiap burung, tetapi tidak melemparkannya ke sarang mereka masing-masing.

Joys divided are increased.

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

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.

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.

Many men and women spend their lives in unsuccessful attempts to spin the flax God sends them upon a wheel they can never use.

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

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.

A noble deed is a step towards heaven.

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.

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

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.

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.

Character lives in a man, reputation outside of him.

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.

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.

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

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.

Responsibility walks hand in hand with capacity and power.

Humanity is constitutionally lazy.

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.

Idleness is the sepulchre of a living man.

Geology gives us a key to the patience of God.

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

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

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.

Wants keep pace with wealth always.

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

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

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

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

We work and that is godlike.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

All things unrevealed belong to the kingdom of mystery.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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?

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

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.

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

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

A man in whom religion is an inspiration, who has surrendered his being to its power, who drinks it, breathes it, bathes in it, cannot speak otherwise than religiously.

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

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

Cost is the father and compensation the mother of progress.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Nature is the master of talents; genius is the master of nature.

Ideals are the world's masters.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Wealth is the least trustworthy of anchors.

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

The choicest thing this world has for a man is affection.

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

There are no twin souls in God's universe.

If you want learning, you must work for it.

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.

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.

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.

There is no truth which personal vice will not distort.

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

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.

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.

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?

A life in any sphere that is the expression and outflow of an honest, earnest, loving heart, taking counsel only of God and itself, will be certain to be a life of beneficence in the best possible direction.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

He that cannot paint must grind the colors.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Life always take on the character of its motive.

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 mind grows by what it feeds on.

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

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.

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.