Top 120 J.G. Holland Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “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.”

— J.G. Holland

52. “All things unrevealed belong to the kingdom of mystery.”

— J.G. Holland

53. “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.”

— J.G. Holland

54. “Immortality – twin sister of Eternity.”

— J.G. Holland

55. “The hammer and the anvil are the two hemispheres of every true reformer’s character.”

— J.G. Holland

56. “He never said it would be easy, He just said He’d go with me.”

— J.G. Holland

57. “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.”

— J.G. Holland

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

— J.G. Holland

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

— J.G. Holland

60. “He that cannot paint must grind the colors.”

— J.G. Holland

61. “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.”

— J.G. Holland

62. “Man’s record upon this wild world is the record of work, and of work alone.”

— J.G. Holland

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

— J.G. Holland

64. “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!”

— J.G. Holland

65. “Humanity is constitutionally lazy.”

— J.G. Holland

66. “Idleness is the sepulchre of a living man.”

— J.G. Holland

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

— J.G. Holland

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

— J.G. Holland

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

— J.G. Holland

70. “Scholarship, save by accident, is never the measure of a man’s power.”

— J.G. Holland

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

— J.G. Holland

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

— J.G. Holland

73. “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.”

— J.G. Holland

74. “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.”

— J.G. Holland

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

— J.G. Holland

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

— J.G. Holland

77. “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.”

— J.G. Holland

78. “We work and that is godlike.”

— J.G. Holland

79. “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.”

— J.G. Holland

80. “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.”

— J.G. Holland

81. “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.”

— J.G. Holland

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

— J.G. Holland

83. “Joys divided are increased.”

— J.G. Holland

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

— J.G. Holland

85. “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.”

— J.G. Holland

86. “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.”

— J.G. Holland

87. “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?”

— J.G. Holland

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

— J.G. Holland

89. “Perfect love holds the secret of the world’s perfect liberty.”

— J.G. Holland

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

— J.G. Holland

91. “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.”

— J.G. Holland

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

— J.G. Holland

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

— J.G. Holland

94. “I have learned that to do one’s next duty is to take a step toward all that is worth possessing.”

— J.G. Holland

95. “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.”

— J.G. Holland

96. “Cost is the father and compensation the mother of progress.”

— J.G. Holland

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

— J.G. Holland

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

— J.G. Holland

99. “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.”

— J.G. Holland

100. “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.”

— J.G. Holland