Josiah Gilbert Holland Quotes

If a person is to get the meaning of life he must learn to like the facts about himself -- ugly as they may seem to his sentimental vanity -- before he can learn the truth behind the facts. And the truth is never ugly.

Above all you must illumine your own soul with its profundities and its shallows, and its vanities and its generosities, and say what your beauty means to you or your plainness, and what is your relation to the ever-changing and turning world.

Look in the mirror. The face that pins you with its double gaze reveals a chastening secret.

If you're really being honest with yourself when you're acting, part of it is touching the real you. You can only separate yourself so much from the character. Those vulnerable moments do touch me.

That's where it begins and ends for me and these songs were the ones that touched me the deepest. It was like I was laying hold of some part of me that I didn't even know was there until I let it out.

Your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.

Whatever you perceive, you always make a story with yourself as the main character, and that dictates your life. Then when you read 'The Four Agreements', you hear another voice beneath the story, the voice that comes from your integrity, your spirit.

I feel like everything I make is personal to me.

What we earnestly aspire to be, that in some sense we are.

I have to figure out why I worked at a job I hated for years. I have to find out why I can’t see what everyone else sees in me. I don’t feel beautiful. When I look in the mirror, I never saw beautiful. For this to happen to someone like me, it’s devastating, Jonas. I don’t want you to think it’s vanity, it isn’t. I can’t see me and I need to be able to do that. I need to find out what I’m like and what I want. I have to be comfortable in my own skin before I can be in a relationship the way you want.

Knowest thou not the beauty of thine own face? Quit this temper that leads thee to war with thyself.

But I am not perfect in my way of putting things Because I lack the divine simplicity Of being only what I appear to be.

We are known in a depth of darkness through which we ourselves do not even dare to look. And at the same time, we are seen in a height of a fullness which surpasses our highest vision.

When you look in the mirror what do you see? Do you see the real you, or what you have been conditioned to believe is you?

And it is very much lamented,... That you have no such mirrors as will turn Your hidden worthiness into your eye That you might see your shadow.

Only within yourself exists the other reality for which you long. I can give you nothing that has not already its being within yourself. I can throw open to you no picture gallery but your own soul.

There are parts of me I only recognize from photographs.

...you find your genius by looking in the mirror of your life. Your visible image shows your inner truth, so when you're estimating others, what you see is what you get. It therefore becomes critically important to see generously, or you will get only what you see; to see sharply, so that you discern the mix of traits rather than a generalized lump; and to see deeply into dark shadows, or else you will be deceived.

Looking back in front of me, in the mirror a grin. Through eyes of love I see, I'm only looking at a friend.

I believe it is our own misperceptions of who we really are that leads to every self-created hell you'll find in this world.

Who is that girl I see, staring straight back at me? When will my reflection show who I am inside?

The next voice you hear will undoubtedly be your own.

There is a direct relationship between our personal experience with the Lord and how we see ourselves. The closer we grow to him, the more clear and complete becomes our vision of who we are, who we have always been, and who we may become.

One must know oneself as one is, not as one wishes to be, which is merely an ideal and therefore fictitious, unreal; it is only that which is that can be transformed, not that which you wish to be.

Very early you come to the realization that nothing will ever take you away from yourself.