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.
Now habit is a labor-saving invention which enables a man to get along with less fuel.
—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.
Pretty much all the honest truth-telling there is in the world is done by children.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Topics: Truth, Children
With most men life is like backgammon—half skill and half luck.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Topics: Life
A thought is often original, though you have uttered it a hundred times. It has come to you over a new route, by a new and express train of associations.
—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.
The world’s great men have not commonly been great scholars, nor its great scholars great men.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Topics: Learning
To obtain a man’s opinion of you, make him mad.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Apologizing.—A very desperate habit,—one that is rarely cured. Apology is only egotism wrong side out. Nine times out of ten, the first thing a man’s companion knows of his shortcoming is from his apology. It is mighty presumptuous on your part to suppose your small failures of so much consequence that you must make a talk about them.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Beware of making your moral staple consist of the negative virtues. It is good to abstain, and teach others to abstain, from all that is sinful or hurtful. But making a business of it leads to emaciation of character, unless one feeds largely also on the more nutritious diet of active sympathetic benevolence.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Topics: Virtue
What I call a good patient is one who, having found a good physician, sticks to him till he dies.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
The longing for certainty … is in every human mind. But certainty is generally illusion.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Topics: Doubt, Uncertainty
If a man has a genuine, sincere, hearty wish to get rid of his liberty, if he is really bent upon becoming a slave, nothing can stop him.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
An artist who works in marble or colors has them all to himself and his tribe, but the man who moulds his thought in verse has to employ the materials vulgarized by everybody’s use, and glorify them by his handling.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Topics: Poetry
A child’s education should begin at least one hundred years before he is born.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Topics: Children
The greatest tragedy in America is not the destruction of our natural resources, though that tragedy is great. The truly great tragedy is the destruction of our human resources by our failure to fully utilize our abilities, which means that most men and women go to their graves with their music still in them.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Topics: Tragedy
Life is a great bundle of little things.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Topics: One Step at a Time
It’s faith in something and enthusiasm for something that makes life worth looking at.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Topics: Enthusiasm, Faith
What a comfort a dull but kindly man is, to be sure, at times! A ground glass shade over a gas-light does not bring more solace to our dazzled eyes than such an one to our minds.
—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: Soul, Worry
Self-abnegation, that rare virtue, that good men preach and good women practice.
—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.
Memories, imagination, old sentiments, and associations are more readily reached through the sense of smell than through any other channel.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Topics: Memory
… the hydrostatic paradox of controversy. Don’t you know what that 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.
Man’s mind stretched by a new idea, never goes back to its original dimensions.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Topics: Imagination, Attitude, Thinking, Ideas, Reading, Perception
Grow we must, if we outgrow all that loves us.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Topics: Change
Put not your trust in money, but put your money in trust.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Topics: Money, Trust
Man has his will,—but woman has her way!
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Wisdom has taught us to be calm and meek,
To take one blow, and turn the other cheek;
It is not written what a man shall do
If the rude caitiff smite the other too!
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Beauty is the index of a larger fact than wisdom.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Topics: Beauty
If you wish to keep as well as possible, the less you think about your health the better.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Topics: Health
Faith, as an intellectual state, is self-reliance.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Topics: Faith, Belief
Writing or printing is like shooting with a rifle; you may hit your reader’s mind, or miss it;—but talking is like playing at a mark with the pipe of an engine; if it is within reach, and you have time enough, you can’t help hitting it.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Beware how you take away hope from any human being.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Topics: Hope
It is a good plan to have a book with you in all places and at all times. If you are presently without, hurry without delay to the nearest shop and buy one of mine.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Topics: Books
Except in cases of necessity, which are rare, leave your friend to learn unpleasant things from his enemies; they are ready enough to tell him.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Topics: Friendship, Feelings
Man has will, but woman has her way.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Lord, bid war’s trumpet cease;
Fold the whole earth in peace.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
The real religion of the world comes from women much more than from men,—from mothers most of all, who carry the key of our souls in their bosoms. The sentiment of love, the sentiment of maternity, the sentiment of the paramount obligation of the parent to the child as having called it into existence, enhanced just in proportion to the power and knowledge of the one and the weakness and ignorance of the other.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Topics: Mothers Day, Ambition
Simple creatures, whose thoughts are not taken up, like those of educated people, with the care of a great museum of dead phrases, are very quick to see the live facts which are going on about them.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Topics: Perception
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