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.
Love prefers twilight to daylight.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Topics: Retirement
And silence, like a poultice, comes to heal the blows of sound.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Topics: Silence
It is the folly of the world, constantly, which confounds its wisdom.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Topics: Wisdom
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.
Topics: Truth
Age, like distance lends a double charm.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Topics: Charm, Aging, Age
Poets are never young in one sense. Their delicate ear hears the far-off whispers of eternity, which coarser souls must travel toward for scores of years before their dull sense is touched by them.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Topics: Poetry
God’s plan made a hopeful beginning. But man spoiled his chances by sinning. We trust that the story will end in God’s glory. But, at present, the other side’s winning.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Topics: Sin
Every real thought on every real subject knocks the wind out of somebody or other.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Beware how you take away hope from any human being.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Topics: Hope
On every stem, on every leaf, and both sides of it, and at the root of everything that dew, was a professional specialist in the shape of grub, caterpillar, aphis, or other expert, whose business it was to devour that particular part, and help order the whole attempt at vegetation.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Topics: Gardening
Life is a great bundle of little things.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Topics: One Step at a Time
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
He must be a poor creature that does not often repeat himself. Imagine the author of the excellent piece of advice, “Know thyself,” never alluding to that sentiment again during the course of a protracted existence!
—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
Many people die with their music still in them. Why is this so? Too often it is because they are always getting ready to live. Before they know it, time runs out.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Topics: Music, People, Carpe-diem, Live
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
When I think of talking, it is of course with a woman. For talking at its best being an inspiration, it wants a corresponding divine quality of receptiveness, and where will you find this but in a woman?
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Topics: Talking
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
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: Belief, Superstition
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: Babies, Gratitude, Blessings
It is not strange that remembered ideas should often take advantage of the crowd of thoughts and smuggle themselves in as original. Honest thinkers are always stealing unconsciously from each other. Our minds are full of waifs and estrays which we think our own. Innocent plagiarism turns up everywhere.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Topics: Plagiarism
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
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.
Topics: Jokes, Humor
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.
Topics: Sanity, Insanity, Stupidity
Science is the topography of ignorance.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Topics: Science
Faith, as an intellectual state, is self-reliance.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Topics: Faith, Belief
The longer we live, the more we find we are like other persons.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Topics: Equality
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: Love, Kisses, Kissing, Kiss
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
Revolutions are not made by men in spectacles.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Topics: Revolutions, Revolution
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.
Life and language are alike sacred. Homicide and verbicide—that is, violent treatment of a word with fatal results to its legitimate meaning, which is its life—are alike forbidden.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Topics: Language
Little-minded people’s thoughts move in such small circles that five minutes conversation gives you an arc long enough to determine their whole curve.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Topics: Conversation, Thought, Thoughts, Reason
Now habit is a labor-saving invention which enables a man to get along with less fuel.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
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.
Science is a first-rate piece of furniture for a man’s upper chamber, if it has common sense on the ground floor.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Topics: Science, Common Sense
Grow we must, if we outgrow all that loves us.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Topics: Change
I try this 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.
Fashion is only the attempt to realize art in living forms and social intercourse.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Topics: Fashion
One unquestioned text we read, All doubt beyond, all fear above; Nor crackling pile nor cursing creed Can burn or blot it: God is Love.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Topics: Divinity, Faith, God
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