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.
Put not your trust in money, but put your money in trust.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Topics: Trust, Money
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
Rough work, iconoclasm, but the only way to get at truth.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Topics: Truth
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.
Topics: Excuses
We expect more of ourselves than we have any right to, in virtue of our endowments
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Topics: Realization, Realistic Expectations, Awareness, Acceptance, Expectations
It is by no means certain that our individual personality is the single inhabitant of these our corporeal frames… We all do things both awake and asleep which surprise us. Perhaps we have cotenants in this house we live in.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Topics: Personality
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.
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.
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
A few can touch the magic string,
And noisy Fame is proud to win them:—
Alas for those that never sing,
But die with all their music in them!
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Topics: Dying, Death
Heredity: An omnibus in which all our ancestors ride, and every now and then one of them puts his head out and embarrasses us.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Topics: Family
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.
Topics: Kisses, Kiss, Kissing, Love
Man’s mind stretched by a new idea, never goes back to its original dimensions.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Topics: Ideas, Reading, Attitude, Thinking, Perception, Imagination, Mind
If a man hasn’t got plenty of good common sense, the more science he has the worse for his patient.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Topics: Science
To obtain a man’s opinion of you, make him mad.
—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.
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.
Life is a great bundle of little things.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Topics: One Step at a Time
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
The man who thinks his wife, his baby, his house, his horse, his dog, and himself severely unequalled, is almost sure to be a good-humored person.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Topics: Gratitude, Blessings, Babies
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.
Topics: Facts
Grow we must, if we outgrow all that loves us.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Topics: Change
It’s faith in something and enthusiasm for something that makes life worth looking at.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Topics: Enthusiasm, Faith
A good soldier, like a good horse, cannot be of a bad color.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Topics: The Military
Every now and then a man’s mind is stretched by a new idea or sensation, and never shrinks back to its former dimensions.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Topics: Learning
If you wish to keep as well as possible, the less you think about your health the better.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Topics: Health
We are all tattooed in our cradles with the beliefs of our tribe; the record may seem superficial, but it is indelible. You cannot educate a man wholly out of the superstitious fears which were early implanted in his imagination; no matter how utterly his reason may reject them, he will still feel as the famous woman did about ghosts, “Je n’y crois pas, mais je les crains,”—“I don’t believe in them, but I am afraid of them, nevertheless”.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Topics: Superstition, Belief
People can be divided into two classes: those who go ahead and do something, and those who sit still and inquire, why wasn’t it done the other way?
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Topics: Humankind, Humanity
The worst of a modern stylish mansion is that it has no place for ghosts.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Topics: Architecture
I should like to see any kind of a man, distinguishable from a gorilla that some good and even pretty woman could not shape a husband out of.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Topics: Marriage
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