Josiah Gilbert Holland Quotes

105 Sourced Quotes

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.

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

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

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

Josiah Gilbert Holland
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.

Josiah Gilbert Holland
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.

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

Josiah Gilbert Holland
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.

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

Josiah Gilbert Holland
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.

Josiah Gilbert Holland
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.

Josiah Gilbert Holland
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.

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

Josiah Gilbert Holland
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.

Josiah Gilbert Holland
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.

Josiah Gilbert Holland