Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

Josiah Gilbert Holland, also Joshua Gilbert Holland

American Novelist,Poet and Editor

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

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

"Character lives in a man, reputation outside of him."

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

"Every man’s power have relation to some kind of work; and whenever he finds that kind of work which we 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."

"Fashion is aristocratic-autocratic."

"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."

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

"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."

"Gossip is always a personal confession either of malice or imbecility; it is a low, frivolous, and too often a dirty business. There are neighborhoods where it rages like a pest; churches are split in pieces by it, and neighbors made enemies for life. Let the young avoid or cure it while they may."

"Home, in one form or another, is the great object of life."

"Ideals are the world's masters."

"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."

"It is not a question how much a man knows, but what use he makes of what he knows; not a question of what he has acquired, but how he has been trained, but of what he is, and what he can do."

"Joys divided are increased."

"No one can disgrace us but ourselves."

"Responsibility walks hand in hand with capacity and power."

"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."

"The heart is wiser than the intellect."

"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."

"The mind grows by what it feeds on."

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

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

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

"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."

"There is no truth which personal vice will not distort."

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

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

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

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

"A man who does not learn to live while he is getting a living is a poorer man after his wealth is won than he was before."

"All things unrevealed belong to the kingdom of mystery."

"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."

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

"If you want learning, you must work for it."

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

"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."

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

"There are no twin souls in God's universe."

"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."

"Work is the means of living, but it is not living."

"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."

"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. "

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

"Faith draws the poison from every grief, takes the sting from every loss, and quenches the fire of every pain; and only faith can do it"

"Labor in all its variety, corporeal and mental, is the instituted means for the methodical development of all our powers under the direction and control of will. "

"Laws are the very bulwarks of liberty. They define every man’s rights, and stand between and defend the individual liberties of all men."

"Let this be understood, then, at starting; that the patient conquest of difficulties which rise in the regular and legitimate channels of business and enterprise is not only essential in securing the success which you seek but it is essential to that preparation of your mind, requisite for the enjoyment of your successes, and for retaining them when gained. So, day by day, and week by week; so month after month, and year after year, work on, and in that progress gain in strength and symmetry, and nerve and knowledge, that when success, patiently and bravely worked for, shall come, it may find you prepared to receive it and keep it. "

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

"Man’s record upon this wild world is the record of work and of work alone. "