Inspirational Quotations

Inspirational Quotes by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (American Physician, Essayist)

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (1809–94) was an American physician, professor, lecturer, and author.

Born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and educated at Harvard, Holmes briefly studied law before turning to the medical profession. As a teacher of medicine at Dartmouth and Harvard (where he later served as dean,) he initiated and advocated far-reaching medical reforms.

Throughout his life, Holmes wrote poetry, novels, and essays. His contemporaries, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and James Russell Lowell, regarded Holmes as one of the best writers of the 19th century. His most famous literary works are the witty essays known as “table talks”—The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table (1858,) The Professor of the Breakfast-Table (1860,) and The Poet of the Breakfast-Table (1872.) Holmes also produced a biography of Ralph Waldo Emerson (1884.)

Holmes’s son was the renowned American jurist and Civil War officer, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr..

More: Wikipedia READ: Works by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

Self-love is a cup without any bottom; you might pour all the great lakes into it, and never fill it up.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Topics: Self-love

People who make puns are like wanton boys that put coppers on the railroad tracks. They amuse themselves and other children, but their little trick may upset a freight train of conversation for the sake of a battered witticism.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Topics: Humor

Beliefs must be lived in for a good while, before they accommodate themselves to the soul’s wants, and wear loose enough to be comfortable.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Topics: Belief

The mortmain of theorists extinct in science clings as close as that of ecclesiastics defunct in law.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

The man who is always worrying whether or not his soul would be damned generally has a soul that isn’t worth a damn.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Topics: Worry, Soul

Revolutions are not made by men in spectacles.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Topics: Revolution, Revolutions

Youth fades; love droops; the leaves of friendship fall;
A mother’s secret hope outlives them all.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Topics: Motherhood, Mothers, Youth

Truth is the breath of life to human society. It is the food of the immortal spirit. Yet a single word of it may kill a man as suddenly as a drop of prussic acid.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

Many ideas grow better when transplanted into another mind than in the one where they sprung up. That which was a weed in one intelligence becomes a flower in the other, and a flower, again, dwindles down to a mere weed by the same change. Healthy growths may become poisonous by falling upon the wrong mental soil, and what seemed a nightshade in one mind unfold as a morning-glory in the other.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Topics: Ideas

Rough work, iconoclasm, but the only way to get at truth.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Topics: Truth

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.

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.
Topics: Heart, Character

The most foolish kind of a book is a kind of leaky boat on the sea of wisdom; some of the wisdom will get in anyhow.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Topics: Reading, Literature, Books

The worst of a modern stylish mansion is that it has no place for ghosts.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Topics: Architecture

Just as a particular soil wants some one element to fertilize it, just as the body in some conditions has a kind of famine for one special food, so the mind has its wants, which do not always call for what is best, but which know themselves and are as peremptory as the salt-sick sailor’s call for a lemon or a raw potato.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Topics: Mind

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.

With most men life is like backgammon—half skill and half luck.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Topics: Life

The longer we live, the more we find we are like other persons.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Topics: Equality

Man has will, but woman has her way.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Topics: Will Power, Willpower, Will

Don’t you stay at home of evenings? Don’t you love a cushioned seat in a corner, by the fireside, with your slippers on your feet?
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Topics: Retirement

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 out of wood, you must make it out of words.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

The nice, calm, cold thought, which in women shapes itself so rapidly that they hardly know it as thought, should always travel to the lips by way of the heart.—It does so in those women, whom all love and admire.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Topics: Heart

Stillness of person and steadiness of features are signal marks of good-breeding. Vulgar persons can’t sit still, or, at least, they must work their limbs or features.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Topics: Ancestry, Family, Ancestors

The world is always ready to receive talent with open arms. Very often it does not know what to do with genius.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Topics: Genius

Take a music bath once or twice a week for a few seasons, and you will find that it is to the soul what the water-bath is to the body.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Topics: Music

Every event that a man would master must be mounted on the run, and no man ever caught the reins of a thought except as it galloped past him.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Topics: Thought, Thoughts, Thinking

Man’s mind stretched by a new idea, never goes back to its original dimensions.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Topics: Perception, Thinking, Ideas, Imagination, Attitude, Reading, Mind

How many women are born too finely organized in sense and soul for the highway they must walk with feet unshod! Life is adjusted to the wants of the stronger sex. There are plenty of torrents to be crossed in its journey; but their stepping-stones are measured by the strides of men, and not of women.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Topics: Woman

Pick my left pocket of its silver dime, but spare the right,—it holds my golden time!
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Topics: Time

In walking, the will and the muscles are so accustomed to working together and performing their task with so little expenditure of force that the intellect is left comparatively free.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Topics: Cooperation, Help

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