Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

Why can't somebody give us a list of things that everybody thinks and nobody says, and another list of things that everybody says and nobody thinks?

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

Poets are never young, in one sense. Their delicate ear hears the far-off whispers of eternity, which coarser souls must travel towards for scores of years before their dull sense is touched by them. A moment's insight is sometimes worth a life's experience.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

The sound of a kiss is not so loud as that of a cannon, but its echo lasts a deal longer.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

Most persons have died before they expire, — died to all earthly longings, so that the last breath is only, as it were, the locking of the door of the already deserted mansion.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

I talk half the time to find out my own thoughts, as a school-boy turns his pockets inside out to see what is in them. One brings to light all sorts of personal property he had forgotten in his inventory.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

"I suppose you are an entomologist?" "Not quite so ambitious as that, sir. I should like to put my eyes on the individual entitled to that name. No man can be truly called an entomologist, sir; the subject is too vast for any single human intelligence to grasp".

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

Science is a first-rate piece of furniture for a man's upper chamber, if he has common sense on the ground-floor.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

It is the province of knowledge to speak and it is the privilege of wisdom to listen.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

Men are idolaters, and want something to look at and kiss and hug, or throw themselves down before; they always did, they always will; and if you don't make it of wood, you must make it of words…

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

Knowledge—it excites prejudices to call it science—is advancing as irresistibly, as majestically, as remorselessly as the ocean moves in upon the shore.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

There's nothing that keeps its youth, so far as I know, but a tree and truth.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

For there we loved, and where we love is home, The chain may lengthen, but it never parts!

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

The god looked out upon the troubled deep And to the distant fleet directs his sight.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

Faith loves to lean on time's destroying arm,And age, like distance, lends a double charm.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

Lord of all being, thronèd afar, Cheers the long watches of the night.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

Grant us Thy truth to make us free, One holy light, one heavenly flame.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

Then the white man hates him [the Native American], and hunts him down like the wild beasts of the forest, and so the red-crayon sketch is rubbed out, and the canvas is ready for a picture of manhood a little more like God's own image.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

Call him not old whose visionary brain Who bears eternal summer in this soul.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

Storms, thunders, waves! But in their graves.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

Love is the master-key that opens the gates of happiness, of hatred, of jealousy, and, most easily of all, the gate of fear. How terrible is the one fact of beauty!

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

I firmly believe that if the whole materia medica, as now used, could be sunk to the bottom of the sea, it would be better for mankind-and all the worse for the fishes.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

I have always considered my face a convenience rather than an ornament.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

Speak not too well of one who scarce will knowBut claim him, keep him, call him brother still!

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

On Thee we fling our burdening woe,Living and dying, Thou art near!

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

I would never use a long word, even, where a short one would answer the purpose. I know there are professors in this country who 'ligate' arteries. Other surgeons only tie them, and it stops the bleeding just as well.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

One unquestioned text we read, Can burn or blot it—God is love.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

If we are only as the potter's clayThe eye of Him who made us, it is well.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

To be seventy years young is sometimes far more cheerful and hopeful than to be forty years old.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

The mossy marbles restOn the tomb.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

I know it is a sinAre so queer!

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

Thou say’st an undisputed thing In such a solemn way.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

And silence, like a poultice, comes To heal the blows of sound.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

You think they are crusaders sent And break the legs of Time.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

And since, I never dare to writeAs funny as I can.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

When the last reader reads no more.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

The freeman casting with unpurchased handThe vote that shakes the turrets of the land.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

And when you stick on conversation’s burrs,Don't strew your pathway with those dreadful urs.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

Wake in our breast the living fires,To die for her is serving Thee.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

Thine eye was on the censer, And not the hand that bore it.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

Where go the poet's lines? Speak from your folded papers!

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

A few can touch the magic string, But die with all their music in them!

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

O hearts that break and give no sign Save whitening lip and fading tresses!

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul,Leaving thine outgrown shell by life’s unresting sea!

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

One flag, one land, one heart, one hand, One Nation evermore!

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

His home! the Western giant smiles, ’T is but a freckle,—never mind it.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

But Memory blushes at the sneer,Laughs louder than the laughing giant.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

You hear that boy laughing?—you think he’s all fun;And the poor man that knows him laughs loudest of all.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

Good to the heels the well-worn slipper feels After a scolding from Carlyle or Ruskin.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

Lean, hungry, savage anti-everythings.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

Have you heard of the wonderful one-hoss shay,It ran a hundred years to a day?

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

A general flavor of mild decay.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

It went to pieces all at once—Just as bubbles do when they burst.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

The brightest blades grow dim with rust, The fairest meadow white with snow.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

When lawyers take what they would giveAnd doctors give what they would take.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

Fame is the scentless sunflower, with gaudy crown of gold;But friendship is the breathing rose, with sweets in every fold.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

All generous minds have a horror of what are commonly called “facts.” They are the brute beasts of the intellectual domain.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

When one has had all his conceit taken out of him, when he has lost all his illusions, his feathers will soon soak through, and he will fly no more.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

Even in common people, conceit has the virtue of making them cheerful; the man who thinks his wife, his baby, his house, his horse, his dog, and himself severally unequalled, is almost sure to be a good-humored person, though liable to be tedious at times.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

A pun does not commonly justify a blow in return. But if a blow were given for such cause, and death ensued, the jury would be judges both of the facts and of the pun, and might, if the latter were of an aggravated character, return a verdict of justifiable homicide.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

You can hire logic, in the shape of a lawyer, to prove anything that you want to prove.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

Some of the sharpest men in argument are notoriously unsound in judgment.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

Everybody likes and respects self-made men. It is a great deal better to be made in that way than not to be made at all.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

Insanity is often the logic of an accurate mind overtasked. Good mental machinery ought to break its own wheels and levers, if anything is thrust among them suddenly which tends to stop them or reverse their motion. A weak mind does not accumulate force enough to hurt itself; stupidity often saves a man from going mad.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

Though fortune scowl, though prudence interfere,Man has his will,—but woman has her way!

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

Put not your trust in money, but put your money in trust.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

Scientific knowledge, even in the most modest persons, has mingled with it a something which partakes of insolence. Absolute, peremptory facts are bullies, and those who keep company with them are apt to get a bullying habit of mind.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

Mark this which I am going to say once for all: If I had not force enough to project a principle full in the face of the half dozen most obvious facts which seem to contradict it, I would think only in single file from this day forward.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

How many people live on the reputation of the reputation they might have made!

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

I try his head occasionally as housewives try eggs,— give it an intellectual shake and hold it up to the light, so to speak, to see if it has life in it, actual or potential, or only contains lifeless albumen.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

Laughter and tears are meant to turn the wheels of the same machinery of sensibility; one is wind-power, and the other water-power; that is all.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

I find the great thing in this world is not so much where we stand, as in what direction we are moving: To reach the port of heaven, we must sail sometimes with the wind and sometimes against it,—but we must sail, and not drift, nor lie at anchor.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

Did I not say to you a little while ago that the universe swam in an ocean of similitudes and analogies?

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

Don't ever think the poetry is dead in an old man because his forehead is wrinkled, or that his manhood has left him when his hand trembles! If they ever were there, they are there still!

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

Do you think I don't understand what my friend, the Professor, long ago called the hydrostatic paradox of controversy?Don't know what it means? - Well, I will tell you. You know, that, if you had a bent tube, one arm of which was of the size of a pipe-stem, and the other big enough to hold the ocean, water would stand at the same height in one as in the other. Controversy equalizes fools and wise men in the same way, — and the fools know it.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

Sin has many tools, but a lie is the handle which fits them all.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

There is that glorious Epicurean paradox uttered by my friend the Historian, in one of his flashing moments: "Give us the luxuries of life, and we will dispense with its necessaries." To this must certainly be added that other saying of one of the wittiest of men: "Good Americans when they die go to Paris."

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

Boston State-house is the hub of the solar system. You couldn't pry that out of a Boston man if you had the tire of all creation straightened out for a crow-bar.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

The axis of the earth sticks out visibly through the center of each and every town or city.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

I won't say, the more intellect, the less capacity for loving; for that would do wrong to the understanding and reason;—but, on the other hand, that the brain often runs away with the heart's best blood, which gives the world a few pages of wisdom or sentiment or poetry, instead of making one other heart happy, I have no question.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

But to radiate the heat of the affections into a clod, which absorbs all that is poured into it, but never warms beneath the sunshine of smiles or the pressure of hand or lip,—this is the great martyrdom of sensitive beings,—most of all in that perpetual auto da fé where young womanhood is the sacrifice.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

The world's great men have not commonly been great scholars, nor its great scholars great men.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

Knowledge and timber shouldn't be much used, till they are seasoned.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

The men of facts wait their turn in grim silence, with that slight tension about the nostrils which the consciousness of carrying a "settler" in the form of a fact or a revolver gives the individual thus armed.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

The great delusion of mankind is in supposing that to be individual and exceptional which is universal and according to law.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

Now habit is a labor-saving invention which enables a man to get along with less fuel,—that is all; for fuel is force.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

The hat is the ultimum moriens of "respectability".

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

The creative action is not voluntary at all, but automatic; we can only put the mind into the proper attitude, and wait for the wind, that blows where it listeth, to breathe over it. Thus the true state of creative genius is allied to reverie, or dreaming.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

You know well enough what I mean by youth and age;—something in the soul, which has no more to do with the color of the hair than the vein of gold in a rock has to do with the grass a thousand feet above it.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

It is by little things that we know ourselves; a soul would very probably mistake itself for another, when once disembodied, were it not for individual experiences which differ from those of others only in details seemingly trifling.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

One could never remember himself in eternity by the mere fact of having loved or hated any more than by that of having thirsted; love and hate have no more individuality in them than single waves in the ocean;—but the accidents or trivial marks which distinguished those whom we loved or hated make their memory our own forever, and with it that of our own personality also.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

Each woman virtually summons every man to show cause why he doth not love her.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

Why should we be more shy of repeating ourselves than the spring be tired of blossoms or the night of stars?

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

The soul of a man has a series of concentric envelopes round it, like the core of an onion, or the innermost of a nest of boxes. First he has his natural garment of flesh and blood. Then, his artificial integuments, with their true skin of solid stuffs, their cuticle of lighter tissues, and their variously tinted pigments. Thirdly, his domicile, be it a single chamber or a stately mansion. And then, the whole visible world, in which Time buttons him up as in a loose outside wrapper.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

Every now and then a man's mind is stretched by a new idea or sensation, and never shrinks back to its former dimensions. After looking at the Alps, I felt that my mind had been stretched beyond the limits of its elasticity, and fitted so loosely on my old ideas of space that I had to spread these to fit it.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

Little I ask, my wants are few;In yonder street that fronts the sun.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

Memory is a net; one finds it full of fish when he takes it from the brook; but a dozen miles of water have run through it without sticking.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

You may set it down as a truth which admits of few exceptions, that those who ask your opinion really want your praise, and will be contented with nothing less.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

Nothing is so common-place as to wish to be remarkable. Fame usually comes to those who are thinking about something else, - very rarely to those who say to themselves, "Go to, now, let us be a celebrated individual!"

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

How many have withered and wasted under as slow a torment in the walls of that larger Inquisition which we call Civilization!

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

Talk about it as much as you like,—one's breeding shows itself nowhere more than in his religion.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

Be polite and generous, but don't undervalue yourself. You will be useful, at any rate; you may just as well be happy, while you are about it.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

Leverage is everything,—was what I used to say;—don't begin to pry till you have got the long arm on your side.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

We forget that weakness is not in itself a sin. We forget that even cowardice may call for our most lenient judgment, if it spring from innate infirmity.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

All of us love companionship and sympathy; some of us may love them too much. All of us are more or less imaginative in our theology.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

There isn't a text in the Bible better worth keeping always in mind than that one, 'Judge not, that ye be not judged.' .

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

What's the use in our caring about hard words after this,—'atheists,' heretics, infidels, and the like? They're, after all, only the cinders picked up out of those heaps of ashes round the stumps of the old stakes where they used to burn men, women, and children for not thinking just like other folks.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

We are very shy of asking questions of those who know enough to destroy with one word the hopes we live on.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

What a miserable thing it is to be poor.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

The Widow Rowens was now in the full bloom of ornamental sorrow.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

Nobody talks much that doesn't say unwise things, — things he did not mean to say; as no person plays much without striking a false note sometimes.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

What a blessed thing it is, that Nature, when she invented, manufactured, and patented her authors, contrived to make critics out of the chips that were left!

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

Truth is tough. It will not break, like a bubble, at a touch; nay, you may kick it about all day, like a football, and it will be round and full at evening.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

Time, time only, can gradually wean us from our Epeolatry, or word-worship, by spiritualizing our ideas of the thing signified.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

You don't know, perhaps, but I will tell you; the brain is the palest of all the internal organs, and the heart the reddest. Whatever comes from the brain carries the hue of the place it came from, and whatever comes from the heart carries the heat and color of its birthplace.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.